“No, indeed!”

Then the cobbler’s daughter flushed deeper and looked grateful, almost modest, for girls read girls pretty fairly, and Jane saw that Eleanor was regarding her face with real admiration.

“You girls of the new generation can’t imagine how much interest we women who used to be girls have in you,” said the judge’s wife.  “I’m afraid you’d be vain if you knew how much Eleanor and I have looked at you and talked about you.”

“I didn’t s’pose any lady that was anybody ever thought anything about girls like me,” Jane finally managed to say.

“You’re greatly mistaken, my dear girl,” said the lady.  “Nearly every one in this world talks a good deal about every one else whom they know by sight.  You really can’t imagine how much good it does me to see you looking so well and pretty.  Keep right on looking so, won’t you?  The girls of to-day must be our women a few years hence; that’s what I keep impressing upon my daughter day by day,—­don’t I, dear.”

“Indeed you do, mother.”  Eleanor said it with a look at Jane which was almost a signal for sympathy:  the cobbler’s daughter was greatly mystified by it.

“I don’t see,” said Jane, after standing awkwardly for a moment in meditation, “how a girl’s goin’ to be much of a woman that amounts to anything one of these days if she’s nothin’ to do now but dirty work at a hotel.”

“Maybe she could change her work,” suggested the lady.

Jane’s lips parted into some hard and ugly lines, and she replied,—­

“Some things is easier sayin’ than doin’.”

“Should you like a different position?” asked Mrs. Prency.  “I’m sure it could be had if people knew you wanted it.  For instance, I need some one every day for weeks to come to help my daughter and me with our sewing and fitting.  There are always so many things to be done as winter approaches.  I sometimes feel as if I were chained to my sewing-machine, and have so much to do.  But I’m afraid such work would seem very stupid to you.  It would mean sitting still all day, you know, with no one to talk to but Eleanor and me.”

Jane looked wonderingly at the two women before her.  No one but them to talk to!  She never had imagined an opportunity to talk to such people at all.  She supposed all such women regarded her as part of the scum of the earth, yet here they were speaking pleasantly to her,—­Mrs. Prency, a woman who naturally would fill the eye of an impulsive animal like Jane,—­Eleanor, the belle of the town,—­two women whom no one could look at without admiration.  No one but them to talk to!  All her associates faded from Jane’s mind like a fleck of mist under a sunburst, as she answered,—­

“If there’s anything you want done that I can do, Mrs. Prency, I’d rather work for you for nothin’ than for anybody else for any money.”

“Come to my house as soon as you like, then, and we’ll promise to keep you busy:  won’t we, daughter?”