It was all a little pantomime of domestic life,--a varied, yet orderly pantomime, and it had continued with suitable variations for more than seven years. Ernestine often thought about it, not so much during the day when her mind was occupied with business wherever her eyes might be, as at night when she returned to her forlorn boarding-house room. That commonplace domestic interior of number 232 had more to do with Ernestine Geyer's life than it would be easy to say. It was her dream, her ideal of life as it should be--and almost never was.
Unconsciously it moved this solitary woman to listen favorably to the advances of a man she met at her boarding place. He was not much of a man--she knew that! A feeble body of a man, indeed, with a drooping, sallow face, and as Ernestine shrewdly suspected, he was making less money at the dry-goods shop where he worked than she made at the laundry. But for a time they "went out together"--a better phrase than became "engaged." Then Ernestine, with an unexpected keenness of vision and readiness to recognize a fact, even if it hurt her pride, knew that the man was marrying her to be taken care of. She had seen enough of that sort of marriage and had no mind for it. If he had wanted her with genuine passion, she would have lived with him--and gladly. But the shame of it all was that he had no desire of any kind for her. And she was not bad looking in spite of her deformity and her glasses. Her large, regular face was full of intelligence, and her black hair was thick and slightly curling. But no man wanted her, just for herself. She looked the fact in the face--and moved to another boarding-house.
About that time another change took place in the laundry business. The old proprietor sold out to two young men who knew little about the business. They incorporated as the "Twentieth Century Domestic Laundry" and left the management in Ernestine's competent hands. The old location was bought for a loft building, and a new building to be wholly occupied by the laundry business was put up farther north. Ernestine disliked leaving her family, as she called "number 232," but she judged that even they would not remain long after all their light had been cut off by the loft building. Anyway she had no time for sentimental regrets, for the business, with fresh blood and new capital, was growing past all belief. "Everybody has to get washed some time," was one of Ernestine's sayings, and it seemed as if a great many had to be washed by the Twentieth Century Company. She was neck and neck with the expanding business, and her salary went up rapidly until by the time she came into Milly's life she was drawing five thousand dollars a year, and earning it all as the responsible head of a business that netted twenty per cent on its capital, with nearly a hundred operatives under her.