The same woman had taken a contract to supply a large firm with wrappers, and employed many in the neighborhood, paying them the smallest possible prices.

This woman was a usurer on a scale so pitiful and petty that it almost condoned usury.
Sometimes a man on discovering the miserable pittance for which his wife toiled during every minute which she could snatch from her household duties and the care of her children, would inveigh against it.

"That woman is cheating you," he would say, to be met with the argument that she herself was only making ten cents on a wrapper.
Looked at in that light, the wretched profit of the workers did not seem so out of proportion.

It was usury in a nutshell, so infinitesimal as almost to escape detection.

Fanny worked every minute which she could secure on these wrappers--the ungainly, slatternly home-gear of other poor women.