“Good land!  That must be the child that ran away five or six years ago, and all the town up in arms over it,” said Mrs. Norman Lloyd.  “Don’t you remember, Cynthia?”

“Yes,” replied Cynthia, and continued pouring tea.  Cynthia was very little changed.  In some faces time seems to engrave lines delicately, once for all, and then lay by.  She was rather more charming now than when one had looked at her with any expectancy of youth, since there was now no sense of disappointment.

“I remember that,” said Norman Lloyd.  “The child would never tell where she had been.  A curious case.”

“Well,” said the school-master, “leaving that childish episode out of the question, she has a really remarkable mind.  If she were a boy, I should advise a thorough education and a profession.  I should as it is, if her family were able to bear the expense.  She has that intuitive order of mind which is wonderful enough, though not, after all, so rare in a girl; but in addition she has the logical, which, according to my experience, is almost unknown in a woman.  She ought to have an education.”

“But,” said Risley, “what is the use of educating that unfortunate child?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say.  What is the use?  There she is in her sphere of life, the daughter of a factory operative, in all probability in after-years to be the wife of one and the mother of others.  Nothing but a rich marriage can save her, and that she is not likely to make.  Milk-maids are more likely to make rich marriages than factory girls; there is a certain savor of romance about milk, and the dewy meadows, and the breath of kine, but a shoe factory is brutally realistic and illusionary.  Now, why do you want to increase the poor child’s horizon farther than her little feet can carry her?  Fit her to be a good female soldier in the ranks of labor, to be a good wife and mother to the makers of shoes, to wash and iron their uniforms of toil, to cook well the food which affords them the requisite nourishment to make shoes, to appreciate book-lore, which is a pleasure and a profit to the makers of shoes; possibly in the non-event of marriage she will make shoes herself.  The system of education in our schools is all wrong.  It is both senseless and futile.  Look at the children filing past to school, and look at their fathers, and their mothers too, filing past to the factory.  Look at their present, and look at their future.  And look at the trash taught them in their text-books—­trash from its utter dissociation with their lives.  You might as well teach a Zulu lace-work, instead of the use of the assagai.”

“Now look here, Mr. Risley,” said the school-master, his face flushing, “is not—­I beg your pardon, of course—­this view of yours a little narrow and ultra-conservative?  You do not want to establish a permanent factory-operative class in this country, do you?  That is what your theory would ultimately tend towards.  Ought not these children be given their chance to rise in the ranks; ought they to be condemned to tread in the same path as their fathers?”