“Why did I come?” The gingham dress on which she had been sewing was folded carefully.  “I came to find out some of the things I did not know about.  I wasn’t of any particular use to anybody else.  No one needed me.  I had a life on my hands that I didn’t know what to do with, and I thought perhaps—­”

“You could use it down here?  You could use a dozen down here, but you weren’t meant not to get married.  Aren’t you ever going to get married, Miss Frances?”

“I hardly think I will.”  Frances Barbour got up and pushed the machine against the wall.  “The trouble about getting married is marrying the right man.  One so often doesn’t.  I wouldn’t like to make a mistake.”  Again she smiled.

“Don’t see how you could make a mistake.  Isn’t there some way you can tell?”

“My dear Carmencita!” Stooping, the child’s face was lifted and kissed.  “I’m not a bit interested in men or marriage.  They belong to—­to a long, long time ago.  I’m interested now in little girls like you, and in boys, and babies, and gingham dresses, and Christmas trees, and night classes, and the Dramatic School for the children who work, and—­”

“I’m interested in them, too, but I’m going to get married when I’m big enough.  I know you work awful hard down here, but it wasn’t what you were born for.  I’m always feeling, right inside me, right here”—­Carmencita’s hand was laid on her breast—­“that you aren’t going to stay here long, and it makes an awful sink sometimes.  You’ll go away and forget us, and get married, and go to balls and parties and wear satin slippers with buckles on them, and dance, and I’d do it, too, if I were you.  Only—­only I wish sometimes you hadn’t come.  It will be so much harder when you go away.”

“But I’m not going away.”  At the little white bureau in the plainly furnished room of Mother McNeil’s “Home,” Frances stuck the pins brought from the machine into the little cushion and nodded gaily to the child now standing by her side.  “I’ve tried the parties and balls and—­all the other things, and for a while they were very nice; and then one day I found I was spending all my time getting ready for them and resting from them, and there was never time for anything else.  If I had died it would not have mattered the least bit that I had lived.  And—­”

“Didn’t you have a sweetheart that it mattered to?  Not even one?”

Into hers Carmencita’s eyes were looking firmly, and, turning from them, Frances made effort to laugh; then her face whitened.

“One can never be sure how much things matter to others, Carmencita.  We can only be sure of how much they matter—­to us.  But it was Christmas we were to talk about.  It’s much nicer to talk about Christmas.  We can’t talk very long, for I meet the ‘Little Mothers’ at half past six, and after that I—­”