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 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 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.