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Updated: June 13, 2025
She gave the Brashears every Saturday two dollars and a half of her three and was ashamed of herself for taking so much for so little, when she learned about the cost of living and how different was the food the Brashears had from that of any other family in those quarters!
Altogether, the Brashears were in excellent shape for a tenement family, were better off than upwards of ninety per cent of the families of prosperous and typical Cincinnati. While it was true that old Tom Brashear drank, it was also true that he carefully limited himself to two dollars a week.
At that touch, at the sound of those rough words at that reality of the terror she had imagined from the days when she went to work at Matson's and to live with the Brashears, she straightway lost consciousness. When her senses returned she was in a cell, lying on a wooden bench.
The Brashears had been burned out twice in their wandering tenement house life; so old Tom was sleeping little; was constantly prowling about the halls of all the tenements in that row and into the cellars. He told Susan the open secret of the meaning of most of these fires. And after he had cursed the fire fiends, he apologized for them. "It's the curse of the system," explained he.
But she would not longer accept from the Brashears what she regarded as charity. "You more than pay your share, what with the work you do," protested Mrs. Brashear. "I'll not refuse the extra dollar because I've simply got to take it. But I don't want to pertend." The restaurant receipts began to fall with the increasing hardness of the times among the working people.
The only thing that saved Susan from all but an occasional cold or sore throat from wet feet was eating little through being unable to accustom herself to the fare that was the best the Brashears could now afford cheap food in cheap lard, coarse and poisonous sugar, vilely adulterated coffee, doctored meat and vegetables the food which the poor in their ignorance buy and for which they in their helplessness pay actually higher prices than do intelligent well-to-do people for the better qualities.
From her coming to the factory in the morning, to hang her hat and jacket in the only possible place, along with the soiled and smelling and often vermin-infected wraps of the others from early morning until she left at night she was forced into contacts to which custom never in the least blunted her. However, so long as she had a home with the Brashears there was the nightly respite. But now
But sickness had to have its special fund; and it was frequently drawn upon, as the Brashears knew no more than their neighbors about hygiene, and were constantly catching the colds of foolish exposure or indigestion and letting them develop into fevers, bad attacks of rheumatism, stomach trouble, backache all regarded by them as by their neighbors as a necessary part of the routine of life.
So, it never occurred to them that Tom Brashear was the sole reason why the Brashears lived better than any of the other families and yielded less to the ferocious and incessant downward pressure. But for one thing the Brashears would have been going up in the world. That thing was old Tom's honesty. The restaurant gave good food and honest measure.
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