ok at yourself, and look at
us!"

As she spoke, Ellen saw projected upon her mental vision herself
passing down the street with the throng of factory operatives which
her bodily eyes actually witnessed. She had come opposite Lloyd's as
the six o'clock whistle was blowing. She saw herself in her clean,
light summer frock, slight and dainty, with little hands like white
flowers in the blue folds of her skirt, with her fine, sensitive
outlook of fair face, and her dainty carriage; and she saw
others--those girls and women in dingy skirts and bagging blouses,
with coarse hair strained into hard knots of exigency from patient,
or sullen faces, according to their methods of bearing their lots;
all of them rank with the smell of leather, their coarse hands
stained with it, swinging their poor little worn bags which had held
their dinners. There were not many foreigners among them, except the
Irish, most of whom had been born in this country, and a sprinkling
of fair-haired, ruddy Swedes and keen Polanders, who bore themselves
better than the Americans, being not so apparently at odds with the
situation.

The factory employes in Rowe were a superior lot, men and women.
Many of the men had put on their worn coats when they emerged from
the factory, and their little bags were supposed to disguise the
fact of their being dinner satchels. And yet there was a difference
between Ellen Brewster and the people among whom she walked, and she
felt it with a sort of pride and indignation with herself that it
was so.

"I don't see why I should be any better than the rest," said she,
defiantly, to Abby Atkins. "My father works in a shop, and you are
my best friend, and you do. Why shouldn't I work in a shop?"

"Look at yourself," repeated the other girl, mercilessly. "You are
different. You ain't to blame for it any more than a flower is to
blame for being a rose and not a common burdock. If you've got to do
anything, you had better teach school."

"I would rather teach school," said Ellen, "but I couldn't earn so
much unless I got more education and got a higher position than a
district school, and that is out of the question."

"I thought maybe your grandmother could send you," said Abby.

"Oh no, grandma can't afford to. Sometimes I think I could work my
own way through college, if it wasn't for being a burden in the mean
time, but I don't know."

Suddenly Abby Atkins planted herself on the sidewalk in front of
Ellen, and loo