"Twenty-two years ago a summer vacation in the country was practically unknown to the working-girl. In August, the dull season, her employer discharged her for two or four weeks. When asked what she did then, one girl replied that she sat on the doorsteps and enjoyed the fresh air. Now all this has changed. The shop or factory girl, when the first mild spring days come and she feels the lassitude arising from months of monotonous toil, looks forward to a happy fortnight of rest and pleasure. She plans and saves for her vacation at the seashore or in the country, and enjoys in anticipation the 'good times' in prospect."

Only the sun and moon seem to invade the confines of the factory walls: "'See the sun?' she exclaimed, lifting her head. (It shone golden through the window's dirty, cloudy pane.) 'He's peekin' at me! He'll find you soon. Looks like he was glad to see us sitting here!' Sun, friend, light, air, seek them - seek them! Pour what tide of pure gold you may in through the sullied pane; touch, caress the bowed heads at the clicking machines! Shine on the dusty, untidy hair! on the bowed shoulders! on the flying hands!"

". . . we should have the roses to take with us for company, and the sweet air of the woodland which lingered about them would scent our thoughts all day, and make us forget the oily smell of the machinery. We were children still, whether at school or at work, and Nature still held us close to her motherly heart. Nature came very close to the mill-gates, too, in those days. There were green grass all around them; violets and wild geraniums grew by the canals; and long stretches of open land between the corporation buildings and the street made the town seem country-like. The slope behind our mills (the 'Lawrence' Mills) was a green lawn; and in front of some of them the overseers had gay flower-gardens; we passed in to our work through a splendor of dahlias and hollyhocks."

"Could we go West and buy a farm, a real farm, a man's farm? It was a startling thought to me - it might well be to a young woman who had never planted a hill of corn, or hoed a row of potatoes in her life, and who had a hacking cough, and a pain in her side. Still I felt strangely daring, since out-of-door life was of course what I needed physically; and home, and freedom from anxiety concerning my daily bread certainly could not retard the cure."

Campbell describes in a chapter on Flower Mission work in prisons how "Long Sal," horror of the city, came closer to reform thanks to the gift of a plant: ". . . Sal tended her geranium with devotion, sending it out regularly by the keeper for air and a sunning. It prospered, and as it grew something grew with it. When Sal's day of release came she looked at the three new leaves on her slip as if each one were a talisman, and the matron said to her: 'When you are settled, Sal, and at work again, I will give you another plant.' Sal was silent, but as she walked away bearing the precious baby geranium she cast back one look at the matron, -- an inscrutable look that might mean a fixed intention not to settle down at all, or a dim and undefined resolution to make the plant life a success whatever might come of her own. . . . it stands on record that Sal, though yielding now and then to her old temptation of drink, remained faithful to whatever pledge she had made the geranium, which grows still, a great plant, every leaf cared for to the utmost by the woman who was once the terror of the Ward."

". . . but what home, no matter how well kept, has or will have power to alter the fact that in them thousands of women must still slave for a pittance that borders always on that life limit fixed by political economists as the vanishing point in the picture of modern life? Sunlight and air may take the place of the foulness now reigning in the dens that many of them know as homes; but will either sun or air shorten hours or raise wages, or alter the fact that not one in a thousand of these women but has grounded her whole pitiful life on a delusion, -- a delusion for which we are responsible?"

"Women especially need consideration from women, and a share in sunshine, which often seems so unequally distributed. But how? . . . Not by building palaces, not by opening gilded saloons or elegant drawing-rooms on rare occasions for a meagre few; not by charities and patronage at all, but by changing working environment, by improving living conditions; by creating and giving access, out of working hours, to libraries, galleries, museums, botanical gardens, and halls where good music can be heard."