fice 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 odor 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, little 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 figures seemed to her the types of the years coming, but she wrote
them down unflinchingly: perhaps life had nothing better for her, so
she did not care. She finished soon: they had given her only an hour or
two's work for the first day. She closed the books, wiped the pens in a
quaint, mechanical fashion, then got down and examined her new home.

It was soon understood. There were the walls with their broken plaster,
showing the laths underneath, with here and there, over them, sketches
with burnt coal, showing that her predecessor had been an artist in his
way,--his name, P. Teagarden, emblazoned on the ceiling with the smoke
of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in the dusty corners; a half-used
broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling desk covered with dust; a
raisin-box, with P. Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full
of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple. That was all,
except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness pervading the whole.
One thing more, odd enough there: a wire cage, hung on the wall, and in
it a miserable pecking chicken, peering dolefully with suspicious eyes
out at her, and then down at the mouldy bit of bread on the floor of his
cage,--left ther