“That’s all you can tell,” returned Briggs.  “Deliver me from a light-complexioned woman.  They’re all the very devil.  Mrs. Briggs says it’s the same girl that read that composition that made such a stir at the high-school exhibition.  She’d make more trouble in a factory than a dozen ordinary girls, and just now, when everything is darned ticklish-looking.”

“That’s so,” assented the foreman, “and all the more because she’s good-looking.”

“I don’t know what you call good-looking,” returned Briggs.

He had two daughters, built upon the same heavy lines as himself and wife, and he adored them.  Insensibly he regarded all more delicate feminine beauty as a disparagement of theirs.  As Briggs spoke, the foreman seemed to see in the air before his eyes the faces of the two Briggs girls, large and massive, and dull of hue, the feminine counterpart of their father’s.

“Well, maybe you’re right,” said he, evasively.  “I suppose some might call her good-looking.”

As he spoke he glanced out of the window at Ellen’s retreating figure, moving away over the snow-path with an almost dancing motion of youth and courage, though she was sorely hurt.  The girl had scarcely ever had a hard word said to her in her whole life, for she had been in her humble place a petted darling.  She had plenty of courage to bear the hard words now, but they cut deeply into her unseasoned heart.

Ellen went on past the factories to the main street of Rowe.  She had no idea of giving up her efforts to obtain employment.  She said to herself that she must have work.  She thought of the stores, that possibly she might obtain a chance to serve as a sales-girl in one of them.  She actually began at the end of the long street, and worked her way through it, with her useless inquiries, facing proprietors and superintendents, but with no success.  There was not a vacancy in more than one or two, and there they wished only experienced hands.  She found out that her factory record told against her.  The moment she admitted that she had worked in a factory the cold shoulder was turned.  The position of a shop-girl was so far below that of a sales-lady that the effect upon the superintendent was almost as if he had met an unworthy aspirant to a throne.  He would smile insultingly and incredulously, even as he regarded her.

“You would find that our goods are too fine to handle after leather.  Have you tried all the shops?”

At last Ellen gave that up, and started homeward.  She paused once as she came opposite an intelligence office.  There was one course yet open to her, but from that she shrank, not on her own account, but she dared not—­knowing what would be the sufferings of her relatives should she do so—­apply for a position as a servant.

As for herself, strained as she was to her height of youthful enthusiasm for a great cause, as she judged it to be, clamping her feet to the topmost round of her ladder of difficulty, she would have essayed any honest labor with no hesitation whatever.  But she thought of her father and mother and grandmother, and went on past the intelligence office.