mmiseration when working out in service. Now no one could comment at
all. She was like every one else. She need not shrink if she were rudely
treated, she might answer back; no longer must she "keep her place,"
hers was the place of the dominant race. When she remembered her lover,
her cheeks flamed. No need to fear that she, a white girl, would ever
again think to give herself without exacting a full return.

But what should she do? She was young and white and had something less
than two thousand dollars to her credit at the bank; moreover, she had
stored in her mind a multiplicity of suggestions to be turned over and
reviewed as she made her way through the streets or lay in her bed at
night. Had she gone to Boston with Miss Witherspoon, she would at once
have used a fair share of her fortune on her education; but, perhaps
because she had cut loose from old plans, she rejected the taking up of
dressmaking. She inclined to stenography and typewriting; but Ellen, who
knew her better than any one else, had looked surprised on learning that
she considered this means of earning a livelihood. She knew she was no
scholar, and a chosen career that involved the swift jotting down of the
ideas of others, later to be transcribed in black type on a white sheet
from which a misspelled word shone with hideous clearness, might end in
disgrace. So stenography was set aside.

Equally she was sure she would not take the advice of Miss Patty. To be
a companion was the highest position that could have been reached by
Hertha, colored; but it was menial service to Hertha, white. She had
renounced a sheltered home; now that she was in the North she meant to
live a new life of freedom.

After three days of happy wandering about the city and of careful
consideration of her personal problem, she made a practical decision.
Her legacy was small, and for the present she knew too little of the
life about her or of her own ability to risk spending it upon an
education. The operating work of which Miss Witherspoon had once spoken
lay along the line of her natural aptitude. Why, then, not try it? If
you were a good workwoman, it paid well. She was in a mood for the
unusual, and therefore, under the guidance of the efficient and
business-like Association secretary, she found herself, a week after her
arrival in New York, doing her part in manufacturing muslin shirtwaists.

Kathleen she had discovered herself. She could not remain long at the
Associ