ndry became the one
thing she lived for: it had her every thought and emotion. She knew from
the first that no man would ever think of marrying her--she saw it in
the pitying glances that the girls gave her. No man would endure a woman
with a withered stump of a right hand, not to mention the ugly scar that
defaced her body. Thus the world of sex shut out with all its related
disturbances, she became by the process of intense specialization a most
efficient worker.

It is not necessary to recount all the steps of her progress upward.
When the small proprietor of the "hand laundry" acquired another
property farther up town she persuaded him to let her manage the old
business under his direction. (He was a widower now and no longer young;
he would have married her, perhaps. But she knew what that meant--a loss
of salary and double work; and she would have none of him as husband.)
She was twenty now, and earning more than she had ever expected to
make,--eighteen dollars a week. After that the years passed quickly
until she was twenty-five and getting thirty dollars a week. Her family
having broken up, she was living in a boarding-house not far from the
laundry....

Through the misty, dirty panes of the window in the rough office on the
upper floor of the old stable where Ernestine now had her desk, she
could look across the narrow street to the row of small brick houses
opposite. These houses had suffered various vicissitudes since Ernestine
had first come to work in the laundry. Then they had been shabby-genteel
boarding-houses like the one a block or two away where she herself now
lived. Gradually the character of the street had improved. Some young
couples, hunting for a spot in all this crowded, expensive city where
they might make their modest nests, had moved into the old-fashioned
houses and renovated them according to modern ideas. Number 232, almost
directly opposite Ernestine's loft, had been among the first thus to
renew its youth. The old iron balconies had been restored and little
green shutters with crescent-shaped peep-holes added, and also
flower-filled window-boxes.

Ernestine had taken a special interest in this house and often
speculated about the life going on within its sober brick walls, behind
the fresh muslin curtains of the upper windows. At first there was just
a man and his wife and a small child, whose young mother wheeled it out
each morning in a basket carriage, for the one maid was busy al