sed; the roads were very heavy, although the snow-plough had
been out at intervals all night, and there was a struggling line of
shovelling men along the car-track, but the cars were still unable
to penetrate the drifts. When Ellen passed her grandmother's house
the old woman tapped sharply on the window and motioned her back
frantically with one bony hand. The window was frozen to the sill
with the snow, and she could not raise it. Ellen shook her head,
smiling. Her grandmother continued to wave her back, the lines of
forbidding anxiety in her old face as strongly marked as an etching
in the window frame. This love, which had at once coerced and
fondled the girl since her birth, was very precious to her. This
protection, which she was forced to repel, smote her like a pain.

"Poor old grandmother!" she thought; "there she will worry about me
all day because I have gone out in the storm." She turned back and
waved her hand and nodded laughingly; but the old woman continued
that anxiously imperative backward motion until Ellen was out of
sight.

Ellen walked in the car-track, as did everybody else, that being
better cleared than the rest of the road. She was astonished that
she heard nothing of the cut in wages from the men. There seemed to
be no excitement at all. They merely trudged heavily along, their
whitening bodies bent before the storm. There was an unusual
doggedness about this march to the factory this morning, but that
was all. Ellen returned the muttered greeting of several, and walked
along in silence with the rest. Even when Abby Atkins joined her
there was little said. Ellen asked for Maria, and Abby replied that
she had taken more cold yesterday, and could not speak aloud; then
relapsed into silence, making her way through the snow with a sort
of taciturn endurance. Ellen looked at the struggling procession of
which she was a part, all slanting with the slant of the storm, and
a fancy seized her that rebellion and resistance were hopeless, that
those parallel lines of yielding to the onslaughts of fate were as
inevitable as life itself, one of its conditions. Men could not help
walking that way when the bitter storm-wind was blowing; they could
not help living that way when fate was in array against their
progress. Then, thinking so, a mightier spirit of revolt than she
had ever known awoke within her. She, as she walked, straightened
herself. She leaned not one whit before the drive of the storm. She