now; you can't have no water in your room, and there won't be nobody up
when you leave in the morning." My evening bath is supplemented by a
whisk of the sponge at five.

Without it is black--a more intense black than night's beginning, when
all is astir. The streets are silent, an occasional train whirls past,
groups of men hurry hither and thither swinging their arms, rubbing
their ears in the freezing air. Many of them have neither overcoats nor
gloves. Now and then a woman sweeps along. Her skirts have the same
swing as my own short ones; under her arm she carries a newspaper bundle
whose meaning I have grown to know. My own contains a midday meal: two
cold fried oysters, two dried preserve sandwiches, a pickle and an
orange. My way lies across a bridge. In the first gray of dawn the river
shows black under its burden of ice. Along its troubled banks
innumerable chimneys send forth their hot activity, clouds of seething
flames, waving arms of smoke and steam--a symbol of spent energy, of the
lives consumed and vanishing again, the sparks that shine an instant
against the dark sky and are spent forever.

As I draw nearer the factory I move with a stream of fellow workers
pouring toward the glass cage of the timekeeper. He greets me and starts
me on my upward journey with a wish that I shall not get discouraged, a
reminder that the earnest worker always makes a way for herself.

"What will you do about your name?" "What will you do with your hair and
your hands?" "How can you deceive people?" These are some of the
questions I had been asked by my friends.

Before any one had cared or needed to know my name it was morning of
the second day, and my assumed name seemed by that time the only one I