By Thursday of the first week I was desperate. How was I ever to “get next” to the dress factory girls? During the lunch hour Friday I gulped down my food and tore for Gimbel's, where I bought five new buttons. Saturday I sewed them on my coat, and Monday and all the next week I ate lunch with Ada and Eva and Jean and Kate at a Yiddish restaurant where the food had strange names and stranger tastes. But at least there was conversation.
Ada I loved—our forelady in the bead work—young, good-looking, intelligent. She rather took me under her wing, in gratitude for which I showed almost immediate improvement along those lines whereon she labored over me. My grammar, for instance. When I said “it ain't,” Ada would say, “Connie, Connie, _ain't_!” Whereat I gulped and said “isn't,” and Ada smiled approval. Within one week I had picked up wonderfully. At the end of that week Ada and I were quite chummy. She asked me one day if I were married. No. Was she? “You don't think I'd be working like this if I was, do you?” When I asked her what she would be doing if she didn't have to work, she answered, “Oh, lots of things.” Nor could I pin her to details. She told me she'd get married to-morrow only her “sweetheart” was a poor man. But she was crazy about him. Oh, she was! The very next day she flew over to where I was framing up. “I've had a fight with my sweetheart!”
It was always difficult carrying on a conversation with Ada. She was being hollered for from every corner of the factory continually, and in the few seconds we might have had for talk I was hollered for. Especially is such jumpiness detrimental to sharing affairs of the heart. I know only fragments of Ada's romance. The fight lasted all of four days. Then he appeared one evening, and next morning, she beamingly informed me that “her sweetheart had made up. Oh, but he's _some_ lover, _I_ tell you!”
Ada was born in Russia, but came very young to this country. She spoke English without an accent. Never had she earned less than twenty dollars a week, starting out as a bookkeeper. When crochet beading first became the rage, about five years ago, she went over to that and sometimes made fifty dollars and sixty dollars a week. Here as forelady, she made forty dollars. Twenty dollars of that she gave each week to her mother for board and lodging. Often she had gone on summer vacations. For three years she had paid for a colored girl to do the housework at home. I despaired at first of having Ada so much as take notice of the fact that I was alive. What was my joy then, at the end of the first week, to have her come up and say to me: “Do you know what I want? I want you to come over to Brooklyn and live with me and my folks.”