Why? Because she answered the advertisements, scores of them, more than a hundred, before she saw through the trick and gave up.She found that throughout New York all the attractive or even tolerable places were filled by girls helped by their families or in other ways, girls working at less than living wages because they did not have to rely upon their wages for their support.And those help wanted advertisements were simply appeals for more girls of that sort--for cheaper girls;or they were inserted by employment agencies, masquerading in the newspaper as employers and lying in wait to swindle working girls by getting a fee in exchange for a false promise of good work at high wages; or they were the nets flung out by crafty employers who speeded and starved their slaves, and wished to recruit fresh relays to replace those that had quit in exhaustion or in despair.
"Why do you always read the want ads?" she said to Lany Ricardo, who spent all her spare time at those advertisements in two papers she bought and one she borrowed every day."Did you ever get anything good, or hear of anybody that did?""Oh, my, no," replied Lany with a laugh."I read for the same reason that all the rest do.It's a kind of dope.You read and then you dream about the places--how grand they are and how well off you'll be.But nobody'd be fool enough to answer one of 'em unless she was out of a job and had to get another and didn't care how rotten it was.No, it's just dope--like buyin'
policy numbers or lottery tickets.You know you won't git a prize, but you have a lot of fun dreaming about it."As Susan walked up and down at the lunch hour, she talked with workers, both men and women, in all sorts of employment.Some were doing a little better than she; others--the most--were worse off chiefly because her education, her developed intelligence, enabled her to ward off savage blows--such as illness from rotten food--against which their ignorance made them defenseless.Whenever she heard a story of someone's getting on, how grotesquely different it was from the stories she used to get out of the Sunday school library and dream over! These almost actualities of getting on had nothing in them about honesty and virtue.According to them it was always some sort of meanness or trickery; and the particular meanness or tricks were, in these practical schools of success in session at each lunch hour, related in detail as lessons in how to get on.If the success under discussion was a woman's, it was always how her boss or employer had "got stuck on her" and had given her an easier job with good pay so that she could wear clothes more agreeable to his eyes and to his touch.Now and then it was a wonderful dazzling success--some girl had got her rich employer so "dead crazy" about her that he had taken her away from work altogether and had set her up in a flat with a servant and a "swell trap"; there was even talk of marriage.
Was it true? Were the Sunday school books through and through lies--ridiculous, misleading lies, wicked lies--wicked because they hid the shameful truth that ought to be proclaimed from the housetops? Susan was not sure.Perhaps envy twisted somewhat these tales of rare occasional successes told by the workers to each other.But certain it was that, wherever she had the opportunity to see for herself, success came only by hardness of heart, by tricks and cheats.Certain it was also that the general belief among the workers was that success could be got in those ways only--and this belief made the falsehood, if it was a falsehood, or the partial truth, if it was a twisted truth, full as poisonous as if it had been true throughout.Also, if the thing were not true, how came it that everyone in practical life believed it to be so--how came it that everyone who talked in praise of honesty and virtue looked, as he talked, as if he were canting and half expected to be laughed at?
All about her as badly off as she, or worse off.Yet none so unhappy as she--not even the worse off.In fact, the worse off as the better off were not so deeply wretched.Because they had never in all their lives known the decencies of life clean lodgings, clean clothing, food fit to eat, leisure and the means of enjoying leisure.And Susan had known all these things.When she realized why her companions in misery, so feeble in self-restraint, were able to endure patiently and for the most part even cheerfully, how careful she was never to say or to suggest anything that might put ideas of what life might be, of what it was for the comfortable few, into the minds of these girls who never had known and could only be made wretched by knowing! How fortunate for them, she thought, that they had gone to schools where they met only their own kind! How fortunate that the devouring monster of industry had snatched them away from school before their minds had been awakened to the realities of life! How fortunate that their imaginations were too dull and too heavy to be touched by the sights of luxury they saw in the streets or by what they read in the newspapers and in the cheap novels! To them, as she soon realized, their world seemed the only world, and the world that lived in comfort seemed a vague unreality, as must seem whatever does not come into our own experience.
One lunch hour an apostle of discontent preaching some kind of politics or other held forth on the corner above the shop.
Susan paused to listen.She had heard only a few words when she was incensed to the depths of her heart against him.He ought to be stopped by the police, this scoundrel trying to make these people unhappy by awakening them to the misery and degradation of their lot! He looked like an honest, earnest man.No doubt he fancied that he was in some way doing good.
