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 laundry 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.