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 figures seemed to her 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.