“Well, I guess your father will be pleased enough,” she said.  She was hard at work, finishing women’s wrappers of cheap cotton.  The hood industry had failed some time before, since the hoods had gone out of fashion.  The same woman had taken a contract to supply a large firm with wrappers, and employed many in the neighborhood, paying them the smallest possible prices.  This woman was a usurer on a scale so pitiful and petty that it almost condoned usury.  Sometimes a man on discovering the miserable pittance for which his wife toiled during every minute which she could snatch from her household duties and the care of her children, would inveigh against it.  “That woman is cheating you,” he would say, to be met with the argument that she herself was only making ten cents on a wrapper.  Looked at in that light, the wretched profit of the workers did not seem so out of proportion.  It was usury in a nutshell, so infinitesimal as almost to escape detection.  Fanny worked every minute which she could secure on these wrappers—­the ungainly, slatternly home-gear of other poor women.  There was an air of dejected femininity and slipshod drudgery about every fold of one of them when it was hung up finished.  Fanny used to keep them on a row of hooks in her bedroom until a dozen were completed, when she carried them to her employer, and Ellen used to look at them with a sense of depression.  She imagined worn, patient faces of the sisters of poverty above the limp collars, and poor, veinous hands dangling from the clumsy sleeves.

Fanny would never allow Ellen to assist her in this work, though she begged hard to do so.  “Wait till you get out of school,” said she.  “You’ve got enough to do while you are in school.”

When Ellen told her about the valedictory, Fanny was so overjoyed that she lost sight of her work, and sewed in the sleeves wrong.  “There, only see what you have made me do!” she cried, laughing with delight at her own folly.  “Only see, you have made me sew in both these sleeves wrong.  You are a great child.  Another time you had better keep away with your valedictories till I get my wrapper finished.”  Ellen looked up from the book which she had taken.

“Let me rip them out for you, mother,” she said.

“No, you keep on with your study—­it won’t take me but a minute.  I don’t know what your father will say.  It is a great honor to be chosen to write the valedictory out of that big class.  I guess your father will be pleased.”

“I hope I can write a good one,” said Ellen.

“Well, if you can’t, I’d give up my beat,” said the mother, looking at her with enthusiasm, and speaking with scornful chiding.  “Why don’t you go over and tell your grandmother Brewster?  She’ll be tickled ’most to death.”

Ellen had not been gone long when Andrew came home, coming into the yard, bent as if beneath some invisible burden of toil.  Just then he had work, but not in Lloyd’s.  He had grown too old for Lloyd’s, and had been discharged long ago.