Ray found that she had to go on making brick loaves, however.  She must keep her men; she could not expect to train them all to new ways; she must not make radical experiments in this trust-work, done for her father, to hold things as they were for him.  Brick loaves, family loaves, rolls, brown bread, crackers, cookies, these had to be made as the journeymen knew how; as bakers’ men had made them ever since and before Mother Goose wrote the dear old pat-a-cake rhyme.

Ray wondered why, when everybody liked home bread and home cake,—­if they could stop to make them and knew how,—­home bread and cake could not be made in big bakehouse ovens also, and by the quantity.  She thought this was one of the things women might be able to do better than men; one of the bits of world business that women forced to work outside of homes might accomplish.  Once, men had been necessary for the big, heavy, multiplied labor; now, there was machinery to help, for kneading, for rolling; there was steam for baking, even; there were no longer the great caverns to be filled with fire-wood, and cleared by brawny, seasoned arms, when the breath of them was like the breath of the furnace seven times heated, in which walked Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Ray had often thoughts to herself; thoughts here and there, that touched from fresh sides the great agitations of the day, which she felt instinctively were beginning wrong and foremost.  “I will work; I will speak,” cry the women.  Very well; what hinders, if you have anything really to do, really to say?  Opportunities are widening in the very nature and development of things; they are showing themselves at many a turn; but they give definite business, here and there; they quiet down those who take real hold.  Outcry is no business; that is why the idle women take to it, and will do nothing else.  It is not they who are moving the world forward to the clear sun-rising of the good day that must shine.  People whose shoulders are at steady, small, unnoticed wheels are doing that.

Dot stayed in the house and helped her mother.  She had a sewing-machine also, and she took in work from the neighbors, and from ladies like Miss Euphrasia Kirkbright, and Mrs. Greenleaf, and Mrs. Farland, who drove over to bring it from Roxeter, and East Mills, and River Point.

“Why don’t you call and see me?” Sylvie Argenter asked one day, when she had walked over to the shop with a small basket, in which to put brown bread, little fine rolls for her mother, and some sugar cookies.  Ray and Dot were both there.  Dot was sitting with her sewing, putting in finishing stitches, button-holes, and the like.  She was behind the counter, ready to mind the calls.  Ray had come in to see what was wanting of fresh supplies from the bakehouse.

“I’ve been expecting you ever since we moved into the Turn.  Ain’t I to have any neighbors?”

The little court-way behind the Bank had come to be called the Turn; Sylvie took the name as she found it; as it named itself to her also in the first place, before she knew that others called it so.  She liked it; it was one of those names that tell just what a thing is; that have made English nomenclature of places, in the old, original land above all, so quaint and full of pleasant home expression.