As the reader learns, five years before Agnes was sent to Birmingham, Alabama in order to study stenography at a business school, for which purpose her father gave her fifty dollars.
Afterwards, Agnes worked as a manicurist in a series of barber shops at Birmingham, Nashville, Memphis and finally on Canal Street, New Orleans—each of a lesser quality than the earlier.
In each she found herself wanted for purposes other than as a manicurist, by men who "put their hands down the neck of my dress and squeezed until I screamed" and who afterwards talked to her about things which she "never heard of at home".
After some time, finding that she was "making more money on the outside than at the [manicuring] table", Agnes left the barber shop altogether and went to live in "a cheap hotel".
Near the end, the reader learns that Agnes' parents regard her as literally "unclean": Whenever she leaves the room, her father wipes the chair she sat on with a cloth soaked in alcohol, and after meals her mother takes the dishes she had used and scalds them in the sink.