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.

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 there, I suppose,
by the departed Teagarden. That was all, inside. She looked out of
the window. In it, as if set in a square black frame, was the dead
brick wall, and the opposite roof, with a cat sitting on the scuttle.
Going closer, two or three feet of sky appeared. It looked as if it
smelt of copperas, and she drew suddenly back.

She sat down, waiting until it was time to go; quietly taking the dull
picture into her slow, unrevealing eyes; a sluggish, hackneyed
weariness creeping into her brain; a curious feeling, that all her life
before had been a silly dream, and this dust, these desks and ledgers,
were real,--all that was real. It was her birthday; she was twenty.
As she happened to remember that, another fancy floated up before her,
oddly life-like: of the old seat she made under the currant-bushes at
home when she was a child, and the plans she laid for herself, when she
should be a woman, sitting there,--how she would dig down into the
middle of the world, and find the kingdom of the griffins, or would go
after Mercy and Christiana in their pilgrimage. It was only a little
while ago since these things were more alive to her than anything else
in the world. The seat was under the currant-bushes still