There was no thoroughfare
there.
She knew too, what sort of life she'd have to face if she offered
herself out in the West Side factory district as a cracker packer, a
chocolate dipper, a glove stitcher; any of those things. You got a sort
of training, of course, at any one of these trades. You learned to
develop a certain uncanny miraculous speed and skill in some one small
operation, as remorseless and unvaried as the coming into mesh and out
again of two cogs in a pair of gears. But the very highest skill could
just about be made to keep you alive, and it led to nothing else. You
wore out your body and asphyxiated your soul.
Rose didn't mean to do that. She was holding both body and soul in
trust. The penitential mood that had resulted from her talk with Portia
was utterly gone. She wasn't looking for hurts. Deliberately to impose
tortures on herself was as far from her intent as shirking any of the
inevitable trials that should come to her in the course of the day's
work. The only way she could see to a life of decent self-respecting
independence lay through some sort of special training--business
training, she thought.
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