“Don't you think so?”
“The prices of turnips and cabbages may crowd other things out,” Ellen replied, and her tone was sad, almost tragic. “You see I am right in it, Mr. Lloyd,” she said, earnestly.
“You mean right in the midst of the kind of people whom necessity forces to neglect the æsthetic for the purely useful?”
“Yes,” said Ellen. Then she added, in an indescribably pathetic voice, “People have to live first before they can see, and they can't think until they are fed, and one needs always to have had enough turnips and cabbages to eat without troubling about the getting them, in order to see in them anything except food.”
Lloyd looked at her curiously. “Decidedly this child can think,” he reflected. He shrugged his arm, on which Ellen's hand lay, a little closer to his side.
Just then they were passing the great factories—Lloyd's, and Briggs's, and Maguire's. Many of the windows in Briggs's and Maguire's reflected light from the moon and the electric-lamps on the street. Lloyd's was all dark except for one brilliant spark of light, which seemed to be threading the building like a will-o'-the-wisp. “That is the night-watchman,” said Robert. “He must have a dull time of it.”
“I should think he might be afraid,” said Ellen.
“Afraid of what?”
“Of ghosts.”
“Ghosts in a shoe-shop?” asked Robert, laughing.