She saw that the walls of the streets were once more in their places. She saw that men’s and women’s heads were once more shut: ... the beating angry solitary worlds, black, red, grey ... spherical, streamer-like ... were sealed once more in skulls of men and women.
Fanny’s new place of work was in the shop of a fur-dresser.
She sat at a long table. She looked above her plying hands at the stooped forms of women across from her: looking above their plying hands at her. Between their shoulders, the window ... gold letters of the Sign standing upon it.
A. R A C H M A N N
FURS
They were in a room like a foul mouth that spoke to the world gold words, dropped this amenity upon the sweep of Elevated structure just abreast the window. Trains passed. Banners of cluttered stationary lives made gay in passing ... sweep of black particles in the gay flourish of passing. Passing! As Fanny worked, the smooth flat tracks of the Elevated trains stood like a way beyond the world. One entered heavy and thick into the train ... one was swept gay!
Fanny worked.
Skins ... dead dusty skins to be ripped and sponged and fitted into shapes. Shapes that were insult to the skins. Her hands raped life. In the filth and shadow of the shop, she felt the mutter of creatures defiled and effaced into dead forms by hands that were not even bloody.
—Furry skins live.
Boney hands defile you.
I am a woman and you are under me!
She felt that they of the shop were very strong, were great ... marring the wistful lives of creatures with warm furs: running thread and needle through them, pressing cloth and water against them. She felt that she dwindled each moment of this work which made her so superior and strong against live creatures. She defiled herself ... she worked to live a desecration upon life.
And then (this work was familiar, she had held this kind of job before) the life of the furs, the life of the girls, the life of her hands died. Fanny knew again her eyes and her black hair and the wondrous world dancing forever within the wall of her brow.