discouragement wore her out easily, and she would come
home at night a pitiable object. She learned her lesson
this time, poor creature; she learned it ten times over.
All the family learned it along with her -- that when you
have once got a job in Packingtown, you hang on to it,
come what will.

Four weeks Marija hunted, and half of a fifth week.
Of course she stopped paying her dues to the union.
She lost all interest in the union, and cursed herself for a
fool that she had ever been dragged into one. She had
about made up her mind that she was a lost soul, when
somebody told her of an opening, and she went and got
a place as a "beef-trimmer." She got this because the
boss saw that she had the muscles of a man, and so he
discharged a man and put Marija to do his work, paying
her a little more than half what he had been paying
before.

When she first came to Packingtown, Marija would
have scorned such work as this. She was in another
canning-factory, and her work was to trim the meat of
those diseased cattle that Jurgis had been told about not
long before. She was shut up in one of the rooms where
the people seldom saw the daylight; beneath her were the
chilling-rooms, where the meat was frozen, and above her
were the cooking-rooms; and so she stood on an ice-cold
floor, while her head was often so hot that she could
scarcely breathe. Trimming beef off the bones by the
hundred-weight, while standing up from early morning
till late at night, with heavy boots on and the floor always
damp and full of puddles, liable to be thrown out of work
indefinitely because of a slackening in the trade, liable
again to be kept overtime in rush seasons, and be worked
till she trembled in every nerve and lost her grip on her
slimy knife, and gave herself a poisoned wound -- that
was the new life that unfolded itself before Marija. But
because Marija was a human horse she merely laughed
and went at it; it would enable her to pay her board
again, and keep the family going. And as for Tamoszius
-- well, they had waited a long time, and they could wait

[[124]]

p123 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p124w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p125

v?