Miss Tonker heard, and came round again.

“Gyurls!” she said, with elegantly severe authority, “I will not have this talking over the work.  Miss Toppings, this whole skirt is an unmitigated muddle.  Head-tucks half an inch too near the bottom!  No room for your flounce.  If you can’t keep to your measures, you’d better not undertake piece-work.  Take that last welt out, and put it in over the top.  And make no more blunders, if you please, unless you want to be put to plain yard-stitching.”

“Eight inches and a half is some room for a flounce, I guess, if it ain’t nine inches,” muttered the mathematical Grace, as she began the slow ripping of the lock-stitched tucking, that would take half an hour out of the value of her day.

“That’s a comfort, ain’t it?” whispered mischievous, sharp, good-natured Kate.  “Look here; I’ll help, if you won’t talk any more Latin, or Hottentot.”

It was of no use to tell those girls not to talk over their work.  The more work they had in them, the more talk; it was a test, like a steam-gauge.  Only the poor, pale, worn-out ones, like Emma Hollen, who coughed and breathed short, and could not spend strength even in listening, amidst the conflicting whirr of the feeds and wheels,—­and the old, sobered-down, slow ones, like Miss Bree and Miss Proddle, button-holing and gather-sewing for dear life, with their spectacles over their noses, and great bald places showing on the tops of their bent heads,—­kept time with silent thoughts to the beat of their treadles and the clip of their needles against the thimble-ends.

Elise Mokey stretched up her back slowly, and drew her shoulders painfully out of their steady cramp.

“There!  I went round without stopping!  I put a sign on it, and I’ve got my wish!  I’d rather sweep a room, though, than do it again.”

“You might sweep a room, instead,” said Emma Hollen, in her low, faint tone, moved to speak by some echo in that inward rhythm of her thinking.  “I partly wish I had, before now.”

“O, you goose!  Be a kitchen-wolloper!”

“May be I sha’n’t be anything, very long.  I should like to feel as if I could stir round.”

“I wouldn’t care if anybody could see what it came to, or what there was left of it at the year’s end,” said Elise Mokey.

“I’d sweep a room fast enough if it was my own,” said Kate Sencerbox.  “But you won’t catch me sweeping up other folks’ dust!”

“I wonder what other folks’ dust really is, when you’ve sifted it, and how you’d pick out your own,” said Bel.

“I’d have my own place, at any rate,” responded Kate, “and the dust that got into it would go for mine, I suppose.”