even in
listening, amidst the conflicting whirr of the feeds and
wheels,--and the old, sobered-down, slow ones, like Miss Bree and
Miss Proddle, button-holing and gather-sewing for dear life, with
their spectacles over their noses, and great bald places showing on
the tops of their bent heads,--kept time with silent thoughts to the
beat of their treadles and the clip of their needles against the
thimble-ends.

Elise Mokey stretched up her back slowly, and drew her shoulders
painfully out of their steady cramp.

"There! I went round without stopping! I put a sign on it, and I've
got my wish! I'd rather sweep a room, though, than do it again."

"You _might_ sweep a room, instead," said Emma Hollen, in her low,
faint tone, moved to speak by some echo in that inward rhythm of her
thinking. "I partly wish _I_ had, before now."

"O, you goose! Be a kitchen-wolloper!"

"May be I sha'n't be anything, very long. I should like to feel as
if I _could_ stir round."

"I wouldn't care if anybody could see what it came to, or what there
was left of it at the year's end," said Elise Mokey.

"I'd sweep a room fast enough if it was my own," said Kate
Sencerbox. "But you won't catch me sweeping up other folks' dust!"

"I wonder what other folks' dust really is, when you've sifted it,
and how you'd pick out your own," said Bel.

"I'd have my own _place_, at any rate," responded Kate, "and the
dust that got into it would go for mine, I suppose."

Bel Bree tucked away. Tucked away thoughts also, as she worked. Not
one of those girls who had been talking had anything like a home.
What was there for them at the year's end, after the wearing round
and round of daily toil, but the diminishing dream of a happier
living that might never come true? The fading away out of their
health and prettiness into "old things like Miss Proddle and Aunt
Blin,"--to take their turn then, in being snubbed and shoved aside?
Bel liked her own life here, so far; it was pleasanter than that
which she had left; but she began to see how hundreds of other girls
were going on in it without reward or hope; unfitting themselves,
many of them utterly, by the very mode of their careless, rootless
existence,--all of them, more or less, by the narrow specialty of
their monotonous drudgery,--for the bright, capable, adaptive
many-sidedness of a happy woman's living in the love and use and
beauty of home.

Some of her thoughts prompted the fashion in which she rec