KENNEBUNKPORT — The bin was full of striped pool towels, slightly damp and smelling of chlorine. Maxine Maurice took one look and shook her head.

“I don’t have any towels now,” Maurice told the man who emerged from the elevator with the bin. His gold nametag introduced him as “Bob.”

The basement laundry room at The Nonantum Resort hummed with the sound of six machines — three washers and three dryers — including one sudsy load of those striped towels. It was just after 4 p.m. on the first day of July during a heat wave, and the pool was packed.

This season is Maurice’s 17th at the resort, where she is a supervisor in the laundry room.

“If we don’t wash all the laundry, they won’t have anything to put on the bed, nothing to put in the bathrooms,” the 51-year-old said. “We have to get everything done in the laundry for the hotel to run, right?”

Sandra Gendron, the resort’s executive housekeeper who is in her 44th season, said her staff of 30 or so people is responsible for 109 rooms in two buildings. Here, where a stay costs $600 a night on average at this time of year, guests have higher expectations than ever.

“They’re here for the ‘wow’ factor,” Gendron said. “It’s up to us to give them that.”

At night, Maurice oversees the flow of towels and sheets and soft waffle robes embroidered with “The Nonantum Resort” in navy thread. She sometimes works with one other person, but this Wednesday evening, she was alone. It would be an extra long shift, starting at noon and ending at 10 p.m.

As the pool towels churned, the phone on the wall rang. Maurice answered, telling the person on the other end that the towels would be ready to go into the dryer any minute.

Maurice, who lives in Sanford, first came to Kennebunkport from Jamaica in 2001 to work at another hotel, where she met her now-husband. She tries to go back to the island for multiple weeks in the winter.

That’s her time to rest, she said.

This summer, Maurice plans to take one day off to buy school supplies for the youngest of her three children. Otherwise, she will work.

Most days, she cleans Airbnbs in Wells and Biddeford. Most nights, she is in the laundry room at The Nonantum. She also cleans rooms and pool bathrooms and other common areas.

She likes that many of the employees have been at the resort for decades; her sister is on the daytime housekeeping crew, and her mom works in the kitchen.

As the machines churned and a fan whirled, Maurice’s ombre lilac manicure flashed against the white washcloths. Just halfway through a 10-hour shift, she was as smooth as the fancy sheets on one of the king beds upstairs.

She deemed the pool towels sufficiently dry with 23 minutes remaining on the cycle and loaded them into a large bin, caster wheels spinning on the concrete floor. On the elevator to the lobby, Maurice eyed the fresh stack.

“I don’t know how long this is going to last,” she said.

Maurice rolled her cart through a set of double doors, down the sidewalk and between lounge chairs. It was just after 5 p.m. but the pool was still busy. As children splashed in the water and adults chatted at the bar, she organized neat stacks of warm towels and gathered a wet mountain of them from the ground.

As she retraced her steps to the basement, the late afternoon sun and the smell of sunscreen and the delighted shrieks faded behind her.

She piled the damp towels into a washing machine and started another load.