tendent's consoling words: "But we will increase your salary as fast as you prove your worth."
But even when a girl tries her level best to prove her worth, and when she gives her undivided attention and efforts to the firm's business, it takes weeks and months to master details and to avoid mistakes. And all that time she must live somehow on what the firm pays her. If out-of-town mothers realized just what this period of probation represented in privation, loneliness, perhaps actual physical discomfort, suffering and hunger, they would do all in their power to keep ambitious but untrained daughters at home. But, unfortunately, mothers who have never worked for their living have false ideas of business life. They see only the well-clad, smiling girls behind counters or in offices, and they do not stop to inquire what price these girls paid for their business training, their present economic independence.
And so, every week of the year, and every day of the week, even including Sunday, the railway trains bring to every large city hundreds of girls utterly unprepared to offer skilled labor in return for living wages, girls who must somehow live while being trained to become real wage-earners.
Only women engaged in social work, representatives of the Travelers' Aid Society and
