Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve

mostly girls from Yankee farms, the mill owners took a benevolent attitude toward their employees and felt obliged to provide decent housing and clean infirmaries. The girls were housed two to a room and were fed communally three times a day in the dining room. In many ways, the boardinghouse was a home away from home, something like a college dormitory. There were libraries and literary societies for the girls, for example, and concerts and plays and so on. A young woman could be said to have had her horizons broadened if she went into the mills.”
    “Even so, I have heard,” says Rufus Philbrick, “that the girls worked ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week, and to ruin one’s eyesight or to become diseased was not uncommon.”
    “This is absolutely true, Philbrick. But my point is that when the Yankee girls began to go home and were replaced by the Irish and French Canadians, conditions deteriorated rapidly. These immigrants have come in families, large families that are forced to crowd into rooms previously meant only for two. The original housing cannot sustain such a large population, and the sanitary and health conditions have broken down. It is only in the past several years that progressive groups have begun to take on the cause of better housing and clinics and care for children.”
    “I have heard something of these progressive groups,” Zachariah Cote says, looking around at the assembled group.
    “Last April,” says Haskell, “I and several other physicians from Cambridge journeyed up to Ely Falls and conducted a survey of as many men, women, and children as we could cajole into participating. The inducement, seven dollars per family, was sufficiently appealing that we were able to examine five hundred and thirty-five persons. Of these, only sixty could be considered to be entirely healthy.”
    “That is an astoundingly poor ratio,” Olympia’s mother says.
    “Yes, it is. The boardinghouses, we discovered, were riddled with disease — tuberculosis, measles, white lung, cholera, consumption, scarlet fever, pleurisy — I could go on and on. I have already gone on and on.”
    “One of the difficulties, John, as I understand it,” says Olympia’s father, “is that some of the immigrants do not have strong cultural opposition to child labor. The Francos, for example, see whole families as
working
families, and thus they try to evade the child-labor laws by having the children do piecework at home, sometimes, depending upon how desperate the family is, for fourteen hours a day in a room with little or no ventilation.”
    “What sort of piecework?” Catherine Haskell asks.
    “The children sew or baste or rip out stitches,” her husband explains. “Simple, repetitive tasks.” He shakes his head. “You would not believe these children if you saw them, Philbrick. Many are diseased. Some are stunted in their growth and have ruined their eyesight. And these children are not twelve years old.”
    The conversation pauses for the contemplation of this startling fact that must be properly digested before the talk can continue. Olympia pokes at her rice croquettes. With the fleeting bravery that comes of being encouraged in conversation, she once again addresses John Haskell.
    “And something else, Mr. Haskell,” she says. “There is a fondness in your portraits. I think you must bear these workers no small amount of affection.”
    John Haskell responds with a small but distinct smile in her direction. “I had quite hoped that such affection would be apparent to the reader,” he says, “but it seems to have escaped the notice of my reviewers entirely.”
    “I believe the critic Benjamin Harrow is better known for his gravity than for his good humor,” says her father, smiling.
    “I wonder if these are not, strictly speaking, something other than essays, John,” says Zachariah Cote, still trying to find a way into the conversation, which has been moving along well enough without