Having gone to find Hugh and bring him food as he works at the furnaces, Deborah lies down on a pile of warm ashes to sleep:
Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty rag,—yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime. Deeper yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing, halfcovered with ashes? no story of a soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce jealousy?
The simile Davis uses here compares Deborah to "a limp, dirty rag.” She is utterly worn out and lies down in the warmth to try and get a modicum of her strength back as Hugh works. Just as a rag is used and discarded to clean unwanted mess, Deborah has soaked up too much dirt and unpleasantness to be able to go on. Her “limpness” indicates her physical and emotional exhaustion, as if she’s become boneless and floppy as a result of too much work. In a home, one would usually sweep up ashes, as they transfer dirt everywhere and can stain. Deborah, however, lies down in them to sleep, suggesting that the ashes are no dirtier than her clothes and body already are.
The narrator appeals to the reader’s sense of pathos in this scene in order to support Davis’s argument that conditions like these are cruel and unsustainable. They ask if the reader can find anything “worth reading in this wet, faded thing,” before going on to imply that there undoubtedly are things “worth reading.” Their invitation to "look deeper" implies that beneath Deborah's “limp” surface there’s the same "groping passionate love" and "heroic unselfishness” that any good person might have. These rhetorical questions prompt the reader to consider how external conditions shape people’s behavior and affect other people's tendencies to judge them on appearance alone.
