"You might sweep a room, instead," said Emma Hollen, in her low, faint tone, moved to speak by some echo in that inward rhythm of her thinking. "I partly wish I had, before now."
"O, you goose! Be a kitchen-wolloper!"
"May be I sha'n't be anything, very long. I should like to feel as if I could stir round."
"I wouldn't care if anybody could see what it came to, or what there was left of it at the year's end," said Elise Mokey.
"I'd sweep a room fast enough if it was my own," said Kate Sencerbox. "But you won't catch me sweeping up other folks' dust!"
"I wonder what other folks' dust really is, when you've sifted it, and how you'd pick out your own," said Bel.
"I'd have my own place, at any rate," responded Kate, "and the dust that got into it would go for mine, I suppose."
Bel Bree tucked away. Tucked away thoughts also, as she worked. Not one of those girls who had been talking had anything like a home. What was there for them at the year's end, after the wearing round and round of daily toil, but the diminishing dream of a happier living that might never come true? The fading away out of their health and prettiness into "old things like Miss Proddle and Aunt Blin,"—to take their turn then, in being snubbed and shoved aside? Bel liked her own life here, so far; it was pleasanter than that which she had left; but she began to see how hundreds of other girls were going on in it without reward or hope; unfitting themselves, many of them utterly, by the very mode of their careless, rootless existence,—all of them, more or less, by the narrow specialty of their monotonous drudgery,—for the bright, capable, adaptive many-sidedness of a happy woman's living in the love and use and beauty of home.
Some of her thoughts prompted the fashion in which she recurred to the subject during the hour's dinner-time.
They were grouped together—the same half dozen—in a little ante-room, with a very dusty window looking down into an alley-way, or across it rather, since unless they really leaned out from their fifth story, the line of vision could not strike the base of the opposite buildings, a room used for the manifold purposes of clothes-hanging, hand-washing, brush and broom stowing, and luncheon eating.