She drooped there over an old coverless book, spelling out the words and trying to forget the pain that was no longer confined to her breast.  From shoulder to hip molten slag pulsed slowly through her veins and great drops of sweat moved from her temples and made white-bottomed rivulets among the smudges of her cheeks.  “I’m done,” she mumbled, closing Grit’s book.  “I got a right to quit.  I got a right to be idle like other people....”

Raising her head she appraised the piles that surrounded her.  “All this stuff!” It had to be disposed of.  She lifted herself from the creaking chair and, finding a pot of black paint and a board, laboured over this latter for a time.  “I could get rid of it in a week,” she mused.  But she was done—­done for good.  “I ain’t going to lay a hand on the cart again!” She studied the sign she had painted, and spelled out the crooked letters:  “M A n WAnTeD.”  It would take a man a month, maybe more, she reckoned, adding:  “Grit could done it in no time.”  She moved to the arched door of the warehouse and hung the sign outside in the sunlight against an iron shutter and for a moment stood there blinking.  Despite the sunlight and warmth she was trembling, the familiar noises were a babel to her ears; the peddlers with their carts piled high with fruits and vegetables and colourful merchandise seemed like strangers; the glossy-haired women with baskets seemed to be passing backward out of her life, and the street was suddenly an alien land.  “What’s the matter with me?” she asked herself.

Returning to the interior gloom of the warehouse, she looked down upon the old junk-cart.  The string of bells was the only part of it that had not been renewed twice, thrice, a number of times since Grit had left it standing on the vacant lot.  “Guess I’ll save the bells,” she decided.

The rest she would destroy.  Nobody else was going to use it—­nobody.  She cast about for an adequate instrument of destruction, an axe or sledge, and remembering a piece of furnace grate upon the farther pile of junk, made her way slowly into the deepening shadows.

There, at the foot of the rusty mountain of scrap iron, Great Taylor stood irresolute, straining her eyes to pierce the gloom.  She had not seen any one enter; and yet, standing beyond the pile with white hands stabbing the bottom of his pockets, was a man.  She could not remember having seen him before, and yet he was vaguely familiar.  One eye looked at her steadily from beneath a drooping lid, the other blinked like the shutter of a camera and seemed to take intimate photographs of all parts of her grimy person.  His sleek hair was curled over his temples with ends pointing up, and she caught, or imagined, the fragrance of pomade.

“What do you want?” she breathed, allowing the heavy piece of iron to sink slowly to her side.

“Sit down,” said the man.  “Let’s talk things over.”

Great Taylor sank into a broken armchair, her huge calloused hands rested in her lap, wrists crossed, palms turned upward, fingers stiffly curled.  “I know who you are,” she mumbled, leaning forward and peering through the half-light.  “What do you want?”