"I know it!" I told him.
"Ah, that's it," he answered. "Wait," he added.
So I waited until they had all spoken with him, and I wondered how any one could watch them and not understand them. One girl, new in the factory, came to him:
"Now you have showed me where I belong in my little life," she said to him in broken English. "Before, I felt as if I had been born and then somebody had walked away and left me there. Now I see where I am, after all."
Afterward, Rose came to me, and her face was new. "If only we could keep them where they are now," she said. "But when they get hungry once, they forget it all."
Mr. Ember and I went down to the street. "Don't you want to walk home?" he said to me. And when we had left the push-carts and the noise, he turned to me in the still street:
"Now tell me?" he said. "How do you know those girls so well?"
I answered in genuine surprise. It seemed to me he must know.
"You!" he exclaimed. "Worked in a factory? At what? And when?"
I told him some of the things that I had done. He listened, and had no idea in the world that it was he who began it all for me. He smiled with me at my year with Miss Manners and Miss Spot. "And now what?" he asked.