Salome gladly accepted and followed the woman up bare, unpainted stairs to the rooms on the second and third floors. These were small and perfectly bare of comforts, almost of necessities. The floors were uncarpeted and guiltless of paint, or even of a very recent application of soap and water. They had no closets. A common pine bedstead—sometimes two of them—in each room, two chairs, in one of which stood a tin basin, while beside it on the floor stood a bucket of water, and a small bureau, made up the sum total of the furniture. In only one room did Salome see any evidences of a literary taste, and that, if she had known it, was a cheap paper, the worst of the sensational class.
Salome’s heart sank within her. She no longer wondered that the mill-girls of to-day were a discontented, ignorant set, nor that many of them sank into lives of degradation.
“The rooms are good enough for the girls,” said the woman, noticing the look of disgust on Salome’s tell-tale face. “They seem poor enough to elegant ladies like you. But these girls know no better. And they are good enough to sleep off a drunk in,” she added, roughly.
“You don’t mean to say,” asked her guest, “that any of your girls get intoxicated?”
“Intoxicated? I don’t know what else you’d call it, when they have to be helped in at eleven o’clock Saturday night, and put to bed, and don’t get up again until Monday morning.”
Salome was sick with pity and shame for her sex. She no longer questioned whether she had a mission toward these, her people.
She went home and wrote the note to Mr. Greenough, given in an earlier part of this chapter.
VII.
Promptly, at the hour named, Otis Greenough, accompanied by the other officers of the mill, appeared at the mansion of the Shepard family.
Tall, beautiful, and always impressive in her bearing, Salome was at her best to-night. The fire of a new-born purpose was in her face, and a new force, born of spiritual struggles, stamped upon her brow.