United States or Guinea-Bissau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Certainly these young benefactors had exercised all their ingenuity. Some of the women, of course, had been fit for nothing but manual labor, and these they had placed as scrub-women in hospitals or as servants in hôtels or families.
They filled their cups, took a lump of sugar in their mouths and began to sip their boiling coffee, silently and decently, the wives of mechanics first, the scrub-women last. But the wife did not see what was going on. Remorse made her quite beside herself. She had a vision. She sat at night out in a freshly ploughed field. Round about her sat great birds with mighty wings and pointed beaks.
Everybody longed to be back in the stone desert, the moon landscape. That is the place for men. Dame Anna Erikson invited all her old friends. The mechanics' wives from the suburbs and the poorer scrub-women came to her for a cup of coffee. The same were there who had been with her on the day of her desertion. One was new, Maria Anderson, the captain of the Salvation Army.
After business hours I don't doubt any number of persons enter this room, to look at the pictures of our great successes that hang on its walls. And then there are the caretakers, the scrub-women, and their friends. I find that they, many of them, bring in outsiders, after working hours, to look at the studio, and the famous offices.
Then a gang of laborers and scrub-women were sent to work to clean up the mess and make the classrooms and unburned dormitories fit for occupation. In two days Putnam Hall was once more in full sway, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, the burnt section being boarded entirely off from the other.
The new arrivals dodged scrub-women and sweepers in the office and on the stairs, and went to their rooms. The Duke, leaving his grandson at his bedroom door, suggested a bit stiffly that he would "call around about eight o'clock and open the den and lead him down to a little raw meat, unless he smoothed up his manners and his appetite in the mean time."
"He does it because it is a part of his work, and a shame it is that he has to. Scrub-women come in and do the rest of the cleaning, but they are not trusted with the desks, and so the attendants have to take turns doing that part of it. That's why your father has to leave so very early in the morning." Mother and son lapsed into silence once more. It was broken by another question from the boy.
Smart," he said, consulting his sheets, "that scrub-women are getting more here than they do in New York City, and I am convinced that there are more scrub-women. Today we had thirty new ones scrubbing the loggia on the gun-room floor, and they all seem to have apprentices working under them. The carpenters and plasterers were not so numerous to-day. I paid them off last night, you see.
She knew the distressing family affairs of the maids; how many were the ignoble progeny of the elevator-man, and what his plebeian wife did for their croup; how much rent the hall-boy's low-born father paid for his mean two-story dwelling in Jersey City; and how many hours a day or night the debased scrub-women devoted to their unrefining toil.
The men were obliging and tried to find scrub-women, but the poor things are afraid of the plague." "Such rumors grow like wire-grass," cried the doctor. Nobody sows it, yet who can uproot it when it is once here?" "Neither you nor I," replied the priest. "The young lady must be brought into this room at once; but it looked neglected, so I've just set it to rights.
Word Of The Day