is morning before I came," said the dressmaker.
"I think a puff on the sleeves of the silk waist will be very
pretty, don't you, Mrs. Brewster?"

Ellen looked at the dressmaker with wonder; it seemed to her that
the woman was going on a little especial side track of her own
outside the interests of her kind. She looked at her pretty new
things and tried them on, and felt guilty that she had them. What
business had she having new clothes and going to Vassar College in
the face of that misery? What was an education? What was anything
compared with the sympathy which love demanded of love in the midst
of sorrow? Should she not turn her back upon any purely personal
advantage as she would upon a moral plague?

When Ellen's father said that to her at the supper-table she looked
at him with unchildlike eyes. "I think it is something for me to
worry about, father," she said. "How can I help worrying if I love
Aunt Eva and Amabel?"

"It's a dreadful thing for Eva," said Fanny. "I don't see what she
is going to do. Andrew, pass the biscuits to Miss Higgins."

"It seems to me that the one that is the farthest behind anything
that happens on this earth is the one to blame," said Ellen,
reverting to her line of argument.

"I don't know but you've got to go back to God, then," said Andrew,
soberly, passing the biscuits. Miss Higgins took one.

"No, you haven't," said Ellen--"you haven't, because men are free.
You've got to stop before you get to God. When a man goes wrong, you
have got to look and see if he is to blame, if he started himself,
or other men have been pushing him into it. It seems to me that
other men have been pushing Uncle Jim into it. I don't think
factory-owners have any right to discharge a man without a good
reason, any more than he has a right to run the shop."

"I don't think so, either," said Fanny. "I think Ellen is right."

"I don't know. It is all a puzzle," said Andrew. "Something's wrong
somewhere. I don't know whether it's because we are pushed or
because we pull. There's no use in your worrying about it, Ellen.
You've got to study your books." Andrew said this with a look of
pride at Ellen and sidelong triumph at the dressmaker to see if she
rightly understood the magnitude of it all, of the whole situation
of making dresses for this wonderful young creature who was going to
Vassar College.

"I don't know but this is more important than books," said Ellen.

"Oh, maybe you'll find out somet