“I will pay you half wages for the two months,” said Mrs. Scherman, “if you will come back to me in September.  And next year, if we all keep together, it will be your turn, if you like, to go with me.”

Kate feels the spring in her heart, knowing that she is to have a piece of the summer.  The horse-chestnut tree in the yard is not a mockery to her.  She has a property in every promise that its great brown buds are making.

“The pleasant weather used to be like the spring-suits,” she said.  “Something making up for other people.  Nothing to me, except more work, with a little difference.  Now, somewhere, the hills are getting green for me!  I’m one of the meek, that inherit the earth!”

“You are earning a whole living,” Bel said, reverting to her favorite and comprehensive conclusion.

“And yet,—­somebody has got to run machines,” said Kate.

“But all the bodies haven’t.  That is the mistake we have been making.  That keeps the pay low, and makes it horrid.  There’s a little more room now, where you and I were.  Anyhow, we Yankee girls have a right to our turn at the home-wheels.  If we had been as cute as we thought we were, we should have found it out before.”

Bel Bree has written half a dozen little poems at odd times, since the rhyme that began her fortune.  Mr. Stalworth says they are stamped with her own name, every one; breezy, and freshly delicious.  For that very reason, of course, people will not believe, when they see the name in print, that it is a real name.  It is so much easier to believe in little tricks of invention, than in things that simply come to pass by a wonderful, beautiful determination, because they belong so.  They think the poem is a trick of invention, too.  They think that of almost everything that they see in print.  Their incredulity is marvelously credulous!  There is no end to that which mortals may contrive; but the limit is such a measurable one to that which can really be!  We slip our human leash so easily, and get outside of all creation, and the “Divinity that shapes our ends,” to shape and to create, ourselves!

For my part, the more stories I write out, the more I learn how, even in fiction, things happen and take relation according to some hidden reality; that we have only to stand by, and see the shiftings and combinings, and with what care and honesty we may, to put them down.

If there is anything in this story that you cannot credit,—­if you cannot believe in such a relation, and such a friendship, and such a mutual service, as Asenath Scherman’s and Bel Bree’s,—­if you cannot believe that Bel Bree may at this moment be ironing Mrs. Scherman’s damask table-cloths, and as the ivy leaf or morning-glory pattern comes out under the polish, some beautiful thought in her takes line and shade under the very rub of labor, and shows itself as it would have done no other way, and that by and by it will shine on a printed page, made substantive in words,—­then, perhaps, you have only not lived quite long—­or deep—­enough.  There is a more real and perfect architecture than any that has ever got worked out in stone, or even sketched on paper.