tooping labor, and her
colorless complexion, not a sickly pallor but a neutral white beneath
the thick black hair, was the result of years spent in a dark, misty
atmosphere, through which even the gas-lights burned dimly. In those
early days when Ernestine scurried across the city in the procession of
working-girls, mornings at seven forty-five and evenings at six, she was
very much like all the others,--a not wholly unattractive young woman
with quick eyes. Perhaps she was a trifle quieter, less emotional than
her companions at the laundry--more reflective in disposition--but not
noticeably more intelligent than the many thousands in her class.

And if it had not been for an accident, which at the time seemed
frightful to her, Ernestine Geyer would probably have turned out, as
most of her kind turn out, either have become the wife of a workingman
with a brood of children to feed the labor hopper or gone to her end
more rapidly on the streets. But one day, owing to a defect in the
machinery that controlled the huge cauldron over which she was bending,
the thing tipped and scalded her with a flood of boiling water on her
right arm and leg. At the hospital it was thought she would have to lose
the arm; but she was too robustly made for that. A frightful red scar
from her hip to below the knee and a withered right hand and forearm
were the results. They took her back at the laundry when she left the
hospital out of pity and a sense of responsibility for her bad luck, and
gave her some light work sorting out clothes and checking pieces, which
she could do after a fashion with her left hand and the withered stump.

Ernestine quickly realized--and just here was the proof of her innate
superiority to the majority--that her only chance for existence was to
make herself so useful in the irregular labor she could perform that she
would not be discharged at the first opportunity. And she worked as she
had never before dreamed she could work! She counted, sorted, marked,
checked the huge piles of restaurant and office linen that the laundry
took. She had the sense to employ a younger brother to assist her with
his whole hands. She became, in a word, the order, the system, the
regulator of the small establishment, and hence indispensable to the
overworked proprietor. Her accident by depriving her of the ordinary
amusements of her fellows also made her more intelligent, because she
had nothing but her work to occupy her mind. The lau