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Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie's successor; of fifteen dollars a week, and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; of vague reasons for going, and vaguer reasons for letting Una go, and no reason at all for her remaining; in all, an ascent from a scrub-rag to a glorified soap-factory designed to provide Mr.
Julius Edward Schwirtz, and all of them, except Una herself, had cigarettes and highballs, and Una confusedly felt that she was getting to be an Independent Woman. Then, in January, 1909, she left the stiff, gray scrub-rag which symbolized the routine of Mr. Troy Wilkins's office. In a magazine devoted to advertising she had read that Mr.
Saw with just such distinctness as had once dangled the stiff, gray scrub-rag before her eyes Schwirtz's every detail: bushy chin, stained and collarless shirt, trousers like old chair-covers. Probably he would always be like this. Probably he would never have another job. But she couldn't cast him out. She had married him, in his own words, as a "good provider."
Woman's place is in the home. Una was doubtless purely perverse in competing with men for the commercial triumphs of running that gray, wet towel round and round on its clattering roller, and of wondering whether for the entire remainder of her life she would see that dead scrub-rag.
Tillie, the scrubwoman, had worked her wet way out of the passage and into the kitchen proper. She and her pail blocked their way. She was sopping up a soapy pool with an all-encompassing gray scrub-rag. Heiny and Gussie stopped a moment perforce to watch her. It was rather fascinating to see how that artful scrub-rag craftily closed in upon the soapy pool until it engulfed it.
Once she knew that she was able to break away from the scrub-rag, that specter of the wash-room, and the bleak, frosted glass on the semi-partition in front of her desk, no wage could have helped her. Every moment here was an edged agony. In this refusal there may have been a trace of aspiration.
It always hung over the twisted, bulbous lead pipes below the stationary basin in the women's wash-room provided by the Septimus Building for the women on three floors. It was a rag ancient and slate-gray, grotesquely stiff and grotesquely hairy at its frayed edges a corpse of a scrub-rag in rigor mortis.
Thank the Lord I'm away from New York clean forgotten it might be a million miles away!" she assured herself. Yet all the while she continued to picture the office Bessie's desk, Mr. Wilkins's inkwell, the sinister gray scrub-rag in the wash-room, and she knew that she needed some one to lure her mind from the office.
"This part," said Henry, "you will wear, over your street clothes, a gown that Madge has brought in her suit-case and a hat that she has also brought, both of which her father will easily recognize, while Madge will redden her face with rouge, muss her hair, don a torn, calico dress, and with a scrub-rag and a mop in her hands easily pass for a scrub-woman. "And then?" I asked.
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