That evening little Amabel, who had developed a painful desire to make herself useful, having divined the altered state of the family finances, was pulling out basting-threads, with a puckered little face bent over her work.  She was a very thin child, but there was an incisive vitality in her, and somehow Fanny and Ellen contrived to keep her prettily and comfortably clothed.

“I’ve got to do my duty by poor Eva’s child, if I starve,” Fanny often said.

When the side door opened, Ellen and her mother thought it was another man come to swell the company in the dining-room.

“It beats all how men like to come and sit round and talk over matters; for my part, I ’ain’t got any time to talk; I’ve got to work,” remarked Fanny.

“That’s so,” rejoined Ellen.  She looked curiously like her mother that night, and spoke like her.  In her heart she echoed the sarcasm to the full.  She despised those men for sitting hour after hour in a store, or in the house of some congenial spirit, or standing on a street corner, and talking—­talking, she was sure, to no purpose.  As for herself, she had done what she thought right; she had, as it were, cut short the thread of her happiness of life for the sake of something undefined and rather vague, and yet as mighty in its demands for her allegiance as God.  And it was done, and there was no use in talking about it.  She had her wrappers to make.  However, she told herself, extenuatingly, “Men can’t sew, so they can’t work evenings.  They are better off talking here than they would be in the billiard-saloon.”  Ellen, at that time of her life, had a slight, unacknowledged feeling of superiority over men of her own class.  She regarded them very much as she regarded children, with a sort of tolerant good-will and contempt.  Now, suddenly, she raised her head and listened.  “That isn’t another man, it’s a woman—­it’s Abby,” she said to her mother.

“She wouldn’t come out in all this rain,” replied Fanny.  As she spoke, a great, wind-driven wash of it came over the windows.

“Yes, it is,” said Ellen, and she jumped up and opened the dining-room door.

Abby had entered, as was her custom, without knocking.  She had left her dripping umbrella in the entry, and her old hat was flattened on to her head with wet, and several damp locks of her hair straggled from under it and clung to her thin cheeks.  She still held up her wet skirts around her, as she had held them out-of-doors, but she was gesticulating violently with her other hand.  She was repeating what she had said before.  Ellen had heard her indistinctly through the door.

“Yes, I mean just what I say,” she cried.  “Get up and go to work, if you are men!  Stop hanging around stores and corners, and talking about the tyranny of the rich, and go to work, and make them pay you something for it, anyhow.  This has been kept up long enough.  Get up and go to work, if you don’t want those belonging to you to starve.”