And everybody abetted her in it.

When she said once to Abby Atkins, whom she encountered one day going home from the shop, that she wondered if she could get a job in her room in the fall, Abby turned upon her fiercely.
"Good Lord, Ellen Brewster, you ain't going to work in a shoe-shop ?" she said.
"I don't see why not as well as you," returned Ellen.
"Why not ?" repeated the other girl.

"Look at yourself, and look at us!" As she spoke, Ellen saw projected upon her mental vision herself passing down the street with the throng of factory operatives which her bodily eyes actually witnessed.

She had come opposite Lloyd's as the six o'clock whistle was blowing.

She saw herself in her clean, light summer frock, slight and dainty, with little hands like white flowers in the blue folds of her skirt, with her fine, sensitive outlook of fair face, and her dainty carriage; and she saw others--those girls and women in dingy skirts and bagging blouses, with coarse hair strained into hard knots of exigency from patient, or sullen faces, according to their methods of bearing their lots; all of them rank with the smell of leather, their coarse hands stained with it, swinging their poor little worn bags which had held their dinners.