She was glad when she came within the radius of a street light from time to time; they were stationed at wide intervals in that neighborhood.  Soon, however, she reached the factories, when all mystery and awe, and vague terrors of what beside herself might be near unrevealed beneath the mighty brooding of the night, were over.  She was, as it were, in the mid-current of the conditions of her own life and times, and the material force of it swept away all symbolisms and unstable drift, and left only the bare rocks and shores of existence.  Always when the child had been taken by one of her elders past the factories, humming like gigantic hives, with their windows alert with eager eyes of toil, glancing out at her over bench and machine, Ellen had seen her secretly cherished imaginings recede into a night of distance like stars, and she had felt her little footing upon the earth with a shock, and had clung more closely to the leading hand of love.  “That’s where your poor father works,” her grandmother would say.  “Maybe you’ll have to work there some day,” her aunt Eva had said once; and her mother, who had been with her also, had cried out sharply as if she had been stung, “I guess that little delicate thing ain’t never goin’ to work in a shoe-shop, Eva Loud.”  And her aunt Eva had laughed, and declared with emphasis that she guessed there was no need to worry yet awhile.

“She never shall, while I live,” her mother had cried; and then Eva, coming to her sister’s aid against her own suggestion, had declared, with a vehemence which frightened Ellen, that she would burn the shop down herself first.

As for Ellen’s father, he never at that time dwelt upon the child’s future as much as his wife did, having a masculine sense of the instability of houses of air which prevented him from entering them without a shivering of walls and roof into naught but star-mediums by his downrightness of vision.  “Oh, let the child be, can’t you, Fanny?” he said, when his wife speculated whether Ellen would be or do this or that when she should be a woman.  He resented the conception of the woman which would swallow up, like some metaphysical sorceress, his fair little child.  So when he now and then led Ellen past the factories it was never with the slightest surmise as to any connection which she might have with them beyond the present one.  “There’s the shop where father works,” he would tell Ellen, with a tender sense of his own importance in his child’s eyes, and he was as proud as Punch when Ellen was able to point with her tiny pink finger at the window where father worked.  “That’s where father works and earns money to buy nice things for little Ellen,” Andrew would repeat, beaming at her with divine foolishness, and Ellen looked at the roaring, vibrating building as she might have looked at the wheels of progress.  She realized that her father was very great and smart to work in a place like that, and earn money—­so much of it.  Ellen often heard her mother remark with pride how much money Andrew earned.