We went out. After the kitchen heat the air of the courtyard was cool. "This is the laundry. A certain number of the Jews here wash and iron the others' clothes. They are kept as clean as possible." The laundry was gray with steam. A dozen or so women were bending over wash tubs. Like the women in the kitchen, they were stripped to their shirts. The wet cloth stuck to their sweating bodies and outlined their ribs and the stretch of muscles as they scrubbed and wrung out the clothes. When the water became too black, some young boys threw it out of doors, and the women waited for the tubs to be filled again, their red parboiled hands resting on their hips, in the way of washerwomen the world over. We crossed the mud before the wash-house, on planks, and went into a house across the courtyard. "This is the tailoring establishment," Mme. C---- continued. "The tailors among them mend and cut over old clothes which we collect for them, so that every Jew may start on the next stage of his journey in perfectly clean and whole clothes. My husband and son complain that they will have to stay in bed, soon, I have taken so many of their suits of clothes.--And here are the shoemakers." We looked into the adjoining room, where the cobblers sat cross-legged, sewing and patching and pegging shoes. "It's very hard to find the leather. But it is so important. If you could see how they come here--their feet bleeding and swollen and their shoes in tatters. And many of them were rich bankers and professors in Galicia and Poland, used to their own automobiles like the rest of us. I think I would steal leather for them." The workers were different from the waiting Jews in the courtyard. Perhaps it was work that gave them importance in their own eyes, and took away that dreadful degrading subserviency--degrading to us as much as to themselves. The whirring noise of the sewing-machines, the click of shears, the bent backs of the workers, and the big capable hands, formed by the accustomed work! The trade of every man could have been known by his hands! My heart was warm toward them. "It's splendid, I think," I said to Mme. C----. As though she guessed my thoughts, she replied, "They are grateful for being allowed to work." "For being allowed to work." Those words damn much in the world. What hindrances we erect in the way of life! And I looked out into the courtyard again, at the apathetic faces of the waiting Jews. Waiting for what? The white, dead faces, with the curved noses and hard, bright eyes, all turned toward us. Were they submissive or expectant, or simply hating us? They say the Galician Jews turn traitors and act as spies for the Austrians. But surely not these. What could these broken creatures do? How near death they seemed!