Ellen looked at him bewildered, then a burning red overspread her face. “Yes,” she replied. “I didn't. But I do now. They would have talked.”
“I thought you would understand that,” said Robert. “I had only the best motives for that. I cannot speak to you in the factory any more than I have done. I cannot expose you to remark; but as for my not calling, I believed what you said to my aunt and to me. I thought that you had deliberately preferred a lower life to a higher one—that you preferred earning money to something better. I thought—”
Robert fairly started as Ellen began talking with a fire which seemed to make her scintillate before his eyes.
“You talk about a lower and a higher life,” said she. “Is it true? Is Vassar College any higher than a shoe-factory? Is any labor which is honest, and done with the best strength of man, for the best motives, to support the lives of those he loves, or to supply the needs of his race, any higher than another? Where would even books be without this very labor which you despise—the books which I should have learned at college? Instead of being benefited by the results of labor, I have become part of labor. Why is that lower?”
Robert stared at her.
“I have come to feel all this since I went to work,” said Ellen, speaking in a high, rapid voice. “When I went to work, it was, as you thought, for my folks, to help them, for my father was out of work, and there was no other way. But since I have been at work I have realized what work really is. There is a glory over it, as there is over anything which is done faithfully on this earth for good motives, and I have seen the glory, and I am not ashamed of it; and while it was a sacrifice at first, now, while I should like the other better, I do not think it is. I am proud of my work.”
The girl spoke with a sort of rapt enthusiasm. The young man stared, bewildered.
Robert caught Ellen's little hands, which hung, tightly clinched, in the folds of her dress, and drew her down to his side again. “See here, dear,” he said, “maybe you are right. I never looked at it in this way before, but you do not understand. I love you; I want to marry you. I want to make you my wife, and lift you out of this forever.”
Then again Ellen freed herself, and straightened her head and faced him. “There is nothing for me to be lifted out of,” said she. “You speak as if I were in a pit. I am on a height.”
“My God! child, how many others feel as you, do you think, out of the whole lot?” cried Robert.