Nell B > Status Update

I finished 'Nellie Bly as a White Slave', the last sketch in Ten Days in a Mad-House. The detail I can't shake: no working girl dares carry a lunch basket, because it marks her as a worker, so they club pennies together for a shared bowl of soup. At the end Bly tells them about the Cooper Institute, a free school, and not one of them has heard of it. The poverty is bad enough; the not-knowing is worse.