“We could start with new people,” said Bel.  “Young people.  They are the very ones that have the hardest time with the old sort of servants.  We could go out of town, where the old sort won’t stay.  You see it’s homes we’re after; real ones; and to help make them; and it’s homes they hate!”

“Where did you find it all out, Bel?”

“I don’t know.  Talk; and newspapers.  And it’s in the air.”

Bel was her old, quick, bright, earnest self, taking hold of this thing that she so truly meant.  She turned round to it eagerly, escaping from the thoughts which she resolutely flung out of her mind.  There was perhaps a slight impetus of this hurry of escape in her eagerness.  But Bel was strong; strong in her purity; in her real poet-nature, that reached for and demanded the real soul of living; in her incapacity to care for the shadow or pretense,—­far more the sullied sham,—­of anything.  Contempt of the evil had come swiftly to cure the sting of the evil.  Satan would fain have had her, to sift her like wheat; but she had been prayed for; and now that she was saved, she was inspired to strengthen her sisters.

“I don’t think I could do anything but sewing,” said Emma Hollen, plaintively.  “I’m not strong enough.  And ladies won’t see to their own sewing, now, in their houses.  It’s so much easier to go right into Feede & Treddle’s, and buy ready-made, that we’ve done the stitching for at forty cents a day, hard work, and find ourselves!”

“I don’t say that every girl in Boston can walk right into a nice good home, and be given something to do there.  But I say there’s no danger of too many trying it yet awhile; and by the time they do, maybe we’ll have changed things a little for them.  I’m willing to be the thin edge of the wedge,” said Bel Bree.

“Right things have the power.  God sees to that,” said Desire.  “The right cannot stop working.  The life is in it.”

“The thing I think of,” said Elise Mokey, decidedly, “is suller kitchens.  I ain’t ready to be put underground,—­not yet awhile.  Not even by way of going to heaven, every night; or as near as four flights can carry me.”

“In the country they don’t have cellar kitchens.  And anyway, there’s always a window, and a fire; and with things clean and cheerful, and some green thing growing for Cheeps to sing to, I’ll do,” said Bel.  “You’ve got to begin with what there is, as the Pilgrim Fathers did.”

Ray Ingraham could have told them, if she had been there this Wednesday evening, how Dot had begun.  Miss Ledwith said nothing about it, because she felt that it was an exceptional case.  She would not put a falsely flattering precedent before these girls, to win them to an experiment which with them might prove a hard and disappointing one.  Desire Ledwith was absolutely fair-minded in everything she did.  The feeling on their part that she was so, was what gave them their trust in her.  To bring a subject to her consideration and judgment, was to bring it into clear sunlight.