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I shall not forget Lady Susan's visit the last morning we spent with her in London, how amazed she was to find 'poor Beatrice' looking so bright and like herself, and how little she guessed at her morning's work, the study of shirt-making, and the copying out a review of her husband's, full of Greek quotations."
I will explain it to you, you see: you are earning twelve sous at shirt-making, the price falls to nine sous; and it is not enough to live on. Then one has to become whatever one can. As for me, I had my little Cosette, and I was actually forced to become a bad woman. Now you understand how it is that that blackguard of a mayor caused all the mischief.
Of this sum, it appears that the worker gets 2s. 1½d., and the sweater sometimes as much as 4s. The competition of married women enters here, for shirt-making requires little skill and no capital; hence it can be undertaken, and often is, by married women, anxious to increase the little and irregular earnings of their husbands, and willing to work all day for whatever they can get.
"No," said Maggie, "I can do nothing more difficult or more elegant than shirt-making." "And your plain sewing is so beautiful, Maggie," said Lucy, "that I think I shall beg a few specimens of you to show as fancy-work. Your exquisite sewing is quite a mystery to me, you used to dislike that sort of work so much in old days."
Indeed, a note of weeping broke her voice for a moment as she burst out, "You know as well as I do that money was a loan!" "Loan!" "You yourself called it a loan!" "Euphuism. We both understood that." "You shall have every penny of it back." "I'll frame it when I get it." "I'll pay you if I have to work at shirt-making at threepence an hour." "You'll never pay me. You think you will.
"So much the better, dear mamma, for if the new judge of the Orphans' Court should give a decision in our favor, as he must, when he hears the evidence, old and new, you and I can move right into it and need not then enter the shirt-making line of business!" "Heaven grant it, my dear!
At a recent strike in a large shirt-making factory in Melbourne, it came out that a competent needlewoman could not make more than eighteen shillings a week even by working overtime, and that the general average earnings of a factory girl were only eleven to thirteen shillings a week.
She remembered his comforting words, his assurance that some day they two and the mother would stand thus together, shining in the eternal light of Heaven. But Dora sighed at the thought of the long weary time before she should join them, unless indeed some accident should happen to her, or she should fall ill and die, from this too heavy task of shirt-making.
They were soon too large for romping and playing. There were stockings to knit and to darn. There were long overseams in sheets; there was no end of shirt-making for the men. They put the hems in their own frocks and aprons, they stitched gussets and bands and seams. People were still spinning and weaving, though the mills that were to lead the revolution in industries had come in.
Also a seamstress was engaged to teach her the art of shirt-making in the afternoon, for it was a theory of Aunt Ninette's that the construction of shirts of all kinds was a most useful branch of knowledge, and she proposed that Dora should learn this art, with a view of being able to support herself with her needle.
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