 Louise works in a New York sweatshop as a sewing-machine girl, alongside her sister Amy and Gertrude, who is sick from the work and deprivation. Louise struggles to keep them all alive. Amy is seduced and, until Louise s intervention, abandoned by the son of the shopowner. But the desperate circumstances take a great turn when the shopowner s other son, whom Louise loves, is injured in a cave-in at the shop.