women. In such establishments, they can fill
every post successfully, but that of overseer: they are too hard with
the hands for that.

The writing here is curious: concise, square, not flowing,--very
legible, however, exactly suited to its purpose. People who profess to
read character in chirography would decipher but little from these
cramped, quiet lines. Only this, probably: that the woman, whoever she
was, had not the usual fancy of her sex for dramatizing her soul in her
writing, her dress, her face,--kept it locked up instead, intact; that
her words and looks, like her writing, were most likely simple, mere
absorbents by which she drew what she needed of the outer world to her,
not flaunting helps to fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that lay
within, before careless passers-by. The first page has the date, in
red letters, October 2, 1860, largely and clearly written. I am sure
the woman's hand trembled a little when she took up the pen; but there
is no sign of it here; for it was a new, desperate adventure to her,
and she was young, with no faith in herself. She did not look
desperate, at all,--a quiet, dark girl, coarsely dressed in brown.

There was not much light in the office where she sat; for the factory
was in one of the close by-streets of the town, and the office they
gave her was only a small square closet in the seventh story. It had
but one window, which overlooked a back-yard full of dyeing vats. The
sunlight that did contrive to struggle in obliquely through the dusty
panes and cobwebs of the window, had a sleepy odour of copperas latent
in it. You smelt it when you stirred. The manager, Pike, who brought
her up, had laid the day-books and this ledger open on the desk for
her. As soon as he was gone, she shut the door, listening until his
heavy boots had thumped creaking down the rickety ladder leading to the
frame-rooms. Then she climbed up on the high office-stool (climbed, I
said, for she was a little, lithe thing) and went to work, opening the
books, and copying from one to the other as steadily, monotonously, as
if she had been used to it all her life. Here are the first pages: see
how sharp the angles are of the blue and black lines, how even the
long columns: one would not think, that, as the steel pen traced them
out, it seemed to be lining out her life, narrow and black. If any
such morbid fancy were in the girl's head, there was no tear to betray
it. The sordid, hard