The target of scandal was "the queen," a big, handsome blonde girl of about twenty-five, who in a different environment and properly corseted and gowned would have been set down unquestionably as "a voluptuous beauty." Here in the laundry, in stocking-feet and an unbelted black shirt-waist turned far in at the neck, she was merely "mushy," to use the adjective of her detractors. The queen owed her nickname to the boss, with whom she was said to "stand in," being "awful soft after him." She was a sort of assistant to the foreman, bossing the job when he was not around, and lending a hand in rush hours with true democratic simplicity such as only the consciousness of her prestige could warrant her in doing. Now she was assisting the black men load a truck, now helping a couple of girls push it across the floor, now helping us dump it on the table--laughing and joking all the while, but at the same time goading us on to the very limit of human endurance. She had been in the "Pearl" for seven years, slaved harder than any of us, and she looked as fresh and buoyant as if she never had known what work was. I rather liked the queen, despite the fact that I detected in her immediately a relentless task-master; everybody else seemed to like her, notwithstanding the malicious things they said about her. "Tired?" asked the one-eyed girl. "Yes, it's hard work, but it's steady. You're never out of a job if you're a steady shaker that can be relied on." There was cheerfulness in her tone, and both the old women stopped talking. "Did yez come in the barber's wagon?" Mrs. Mooney asked. On being assured that we had not, she proceeded to establish amicable relations with the one-eyed girl and me by telling us she was glad we "weren't Ginnies, anyway." "Whatever happened to yer eye?" inquired the other crone of my companion. Unresentful of the blunt inquisitiveness, the girl responded cordially with her little story--glad, apparently, to have a listener. "It was something I caught in the hospital when I had appendicitis three years ago. When I was discharged my appendicitis was well, but my eye had took sore. The doctor he says when he seen it, 'That eye's too far gone, and it's got to come out, or the poison 'll spread to the t'other eye, and then you won't have no eyes at all.' My mother she didn't know nothing about it till it was all over. She'd have carried on awful if she'd knowed it. But it didn't hurt a bit. I went under chloroform, and when I come out of it I jist thought I'd been having a long sleep in a big brass bedstead, with hem-stitched sheets and things like that," and she pointed to the hotel linen we were all shaking. "That's the way with them hospitals," said Mrs. Mooney, sympathetically, and proffering the heroine of the story a chunk of spice-cake. "You'd been better to ha' stayed at home. Poor folks don't have no chanst in them high-toned places."