impulse to flee, to seek warmth and food and proper shelter--to snap my
fingers at experience and be grateful I was born among the fortunate.
Something within me calls _Courage_! I take a room at three dollars a
week with board, put my things in it, and while my feet yet ache with
cold I start to find a factory, a pickle factory, which, the matron
tells me, is run by a Christian gentleman.

I have felt timid and even overbold at different moments in my life,
but never so audacious as on entering a factory door marked in gilt
letters: "_Women Employees_."

The Cerberus between me and the fulfilment of my purpose is a
gray-haired timekeeper with kindly eyes. He sits in a glass cage and
about him are a score or more of clocks all ticking soundly and all
surrounded by an extra dial of small numbers running from one to a
thousand. Each number means a workman--each tick of the clock a moment
of his life gone in the service of the pickle company. I rap on the
window of the glass cage. It opens.

"Do you need any girls?" I ask, trying not to show my emotion.

"Ever worked in a factory?"

"No, sir; but I'm very handy."

"What have you done?"

"Housework," I respond with conviction, beginning to believe it myself.

"Well," he says, looking at me, "they need help up in the bottling