gang outside, and would make free with the girls as they
went to and from their work. In the slack seasons some
of them would go with Miss Henderson to this house
down-town -- in fact, it would not be too much to say that
she managed her department at Brown's in conjunction
with it. Sometimes women from the house would be
given places alongside of decent girls, and after other
decent girls had been turned off to make room for them.
When you worked in this woman's department the house
down-town was never out of your thoughts all day -- there
were always whiffs of it to be caught, like the odor of the
Packingtown rendering-plants at night, when the wind
shifted suddenly. There would be stories about it going
the rounds; the girls opposite you would be telling them
and winking at you. In such a place Ona would not
have stayed a day, but for starvation; and, as it was, she
was never sure that she could stay the next day. She
understood now that the real reason that Miss Henderson
hated her was that she was a decent married girl; and
she knew that the talebearers and the toadies hated her
for the same reason, and were doing their best to make
her life miserable.

But there was no place a girl could go in Packingtown,
if she was particular about things of this sort; there was
no place in it where a prostitute could not get along better
than a decent girl. Here was a population, low-class and
mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation,
and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim
of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-
time slave-drivers; under such circumstances immorality
was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under
the system of chattel slavery. Things that were quite
unspeakable went on there in the packing-houses all the
time, and were taken for granted by everybody; only
they did not show, as in the old slavery times, because
there was no difference in color between master and slave.

One morning Ona stayed home, and Jurgis had the
man-doctor, according to his whim, and she was safely

[[126]]

p125 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p126w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p127

v?