the end of a huge kitchen range
against two struggling members of the other sex. A pain shot through
her breast, but she carried her part of the dead weight, saying
nothing, and, at high noon, pushed her jingling, jangling cart through
streets sharply outlined with sunlight and shadow to a dilapidated
brick warehouse that, long since, had taken the place of Grit's
junk-yard.

There, in the interior gloom of the shabby old building, could be seen
piles of broken, twisted, and rusty things--twisted iron rods, broken
cam-shafts, cog wheels with missing teeth, springs that had lost their
elasticity--a miniature mountain of scrap iron each piece of which at
some time had been a part of some smoothly working machine. In another
pile were discarded household utensils--old pots and pans and
burnt-out kettles, old stoves through the linings of which the flames
had eaten and the rust had gnawed. There were other hillocks and
mountains with shadowy valleys between--a mountain of waste paper,
partly baled, partly stuffed into bursting bags of burlap, partly
loose and scattered over the grimy floor; a hill of rags, all colours
fading into sombre shadows.... And in the midst of these mountains and
valleys of junk sat Great Taylor upon her dilapidated throne.

She drooped there over an old coverless book, spelling out the words
and trying to forget the pain that was no longer confined to her
breast. From shoulder to hip molten slag pulsed slowly through her
veins and great drops of sweat moved from her temples and made
white-bottomed rivulets among the smudges of her cheeks. "I'm done,"
she mumbled, closing Grit's book. "I got a right to quit. I got a
right to be idle like other people...."

Raising her head she appraised the piles that surrounded her. "All
this stuff!" It had to be disposed of. She lifted herself from the
creaking chair and, finding a pot of black paint and a board, laboured
over this latter for a time. "I could get rid of it in a week," she
mused. But she was done--done for good. "I ain't going to lay a hand
on the cart again!" She studied the sign she had painted, and spelled
out the crooked letters: "M A n WAnTeD." It would take a man a month,
maybe more, she reckoned, adding: "Grit could done it in no time." She
moved to the arched door of the warehouse and hung the sign outside in
the sunlight against an iron shutter and for a moment stood there
blinking. Despite the sunlight and warmth she was trembling, th