“Well, I wouldn’t live so.  And Aunt Blin wouldn’t.  I’m afraid she didn’t have other things quite so—­corresponding—­when she was by herself; but she had the home comfort.  And, truly, now, I shouldn’t wonder if there was real nourishment in just looking round,—­at a red carpet and things,—­when you’ve got ’em all just to your own mind.  You can piece out with—­peace!”

For two or three minutes, there was nothing heard after that in Bel and Elise’s corner, but the regular busy click of the machines, as the tucks ran evenly through.  Miss Tonker was hovering in the neighborhood.  But presently, as she moved off, and Elise had a spool to change, Bel began again.

“Why don’t you get up something different?  Why couldn’t a dozen, or twenty, take a flat, or a whole house, and have a housekeeper, and live nice?  I believe I could contrive.”

Bel was a born contriver.  She was a born reformer, as all poets are; only she did not know yet that she was either.  That had been the real trouble up in New Hampshire.  She had her ideals, and she could not carry them out; so she sat and dreamed of what she would do if she could.  If she might in any way have moulded her home to her own more delicate instincts, it may be that her step-mother need not have had to complain that “there was no spunk or snap to her about anything.”  It was not in her to “whew round” among tubs and whey,—­to go slap-dash into soapmaking, or the coarse Monday’s washing, when all nicer cares were evaded or forbidden, when chairs were shoved back against each other into corners, table-cloths left crooked, and dragging and crumby, drawing the flies,—­mantel ornaments of uncouth odds and ends pushed all awry and one side during a dusting, and left so,—­carpets rough and untidy at the corners; no touch of prettiness or pleasantness, nothing but clear, necessary work anywhere.  She would have made home home; then she would have worked for it.

Aunt Blin was like her.  She would rather sit behind her blinds in her neat, quiet room of a Sunday, too tired to go to church, but with a kind of sacred rest about her, and a possible hushed thought of a presence in a place that God had let her make that He might abide with her in it,—­than to live as these girls did,—­even to have been young like them; to have put on fine, gay things, bought with the small surplus of her weekly earnings after the wretched board was paid, and parade the streets, or sit in a pew, with a Sunday-consciousness of gloves and new bonnet upon her.

“O, faugh!” said Elise Mokey, impatiently, to Bel’s “I could contrive.”  “I should like to see you, with girls like Matilda Meane.  You’ve got to get your dozen or twenty, first, and make them agree.”

Miss Mokey had very likely never heard of Mrs. Glass, or of the “catching your hare,” which is the impracticable hitch at the start of most delicious things that might otherwise be done.