considerations. And if he were anything,--anything of a
man, and doing anything in the world as a man does,--what would they
do with two businesses? The whole vexed question solved itself to
her mind in this home-fashion. "It isn't natural; there never will
be much of it in the world," she said. "Young women, with their real
womanhood in them, won't; and by the time they've lived on and found
out, the chances will be over. To do business as a man does, you
must choose as a man does,--for your whole life, at the beginning of
it."

Ray Ingraham, with all her capacity and courage, at this
turning-point where choice was given her, and duty no longer showed
her one inevitable way, chose deliberately to be a woman. She took
up a woman's lot, with all its uncertainty and disadvantage; the lot
of _working for others_.

"I can find something simply to do and to be paid for; that will be
safe and faithful; that will leave room."

She said something like that to Frank Sunderline, when he sat
talking with her over some building accounts one evening.

He had come in as a friend and had helped them in many little ways;
beside having especial occasion in this matter, as representing his
own employer who held a small demand against the estate.

"I am too young," she told him. "Dot is too young. I should feel as
if I _must_ have her with me if I kept on, and we should need to
keep all the little money together. How can I tell what Dot--how can
I tell what either of us"--she changed her word with brave honesty,
"might have a wish for, before seven years were over? If I were
forty years old, and could do it, I would; I would take girls for
journeymen,--girls who wanted work and pay; then they would be
brought up to a very good business for women, if they came to want
business and they would be free, while they _were_ girls, for
happier things that might happen."

"That is good Woman's Rights doctrine; it doesn't leave out the best
right of all."

"A woman can't shape out her life all beforehand, as a man can; she
can't be sure, you see; and nobody else could feel sure about her. I
suppose _that_ is what has kept women out of the real business
world,--the ordering and heading of things. But they can help. I'm
willing to help, somehow; and I guess the world will let me."

There was something that went straight to Frank Sunderline's
deepest, unspoken apprehension of most beautiful things, in Ray
Ingraham's aspect as she said these