Bel Bree tucked away.  Tucked away thoughts also, as she worked.  Not one of those girls who had been talking had anything like a home.  What was there for them at the year’s end, after the wearing round and round of daily toil, but the diminishing dream of a happier living that might never come true?  The fading away out of their health and prettiness into “old things like Miss Proddle and Aunt Blin,”—­to take their turn then, in being snubbed and shoved aside?  Bel liked her own life here, so far; it was pleasanter than that which she had left; but she began to see how hundreds of other girls were going on in it without reward or hope; unfitting themselves, many of them utterly, by the very mode of their careless, rootless existence,—­all of them, more or less, by the narrow specialty of their monotonous drudgery,—­for the bright, capable, adaptive many-sidedness of a happy woman’s living in the love and use and beauty of home.

Some of her thoughts prompted the fashion in which she recurred to the subject during the hour’s dinner-time.

They were grouped together—­the same half dozen—­in a little ante-room, with a very dusty window looking down into an alley-way, or across it rather, since unless they really leaned out from their fifth story, the line of vision could not strike the base of the opposite buildings, a room used for the manifold purposes of clothes-hanging, hand-washing, brush and broom stowing, and luncheon eating.

“Girls!  What would you do most for in this world?  What would you have for your choice, if you could get it?”

“Stories to read, and theatre tickets every night,” said Grace Toppings.

“Something decent to eat, as often as I was hungry,” said Matilda Meane, speaking thick through a big mouthful of cream-cake.

“To be married to Lord Mortimer, and go and live in an Abbey,” said Mary Pinfall, who sat on a box with a cracker in one hand, and the third volume of her old novel in the other.

The girls shouted.

“That means you’d like a real good husband,—­a Tom, or a Dick, or a Harry,” said Kate Sencerbox.  “Lord Mortimers don’t grow in this country.  We must take the kind that do.  And so we will, every one of us, when we can get ’em.  Only I hope mine will keep a store of his own, and have a house up in Chester Park!”

“If I can ever see the time that I can have dresses made for me, instead of working my head and feet off making them for other people, I don’t care where my house is!” said Elise Mokey.

“Or your husband either, I suppose,” said Kate, sharply.

“Wouldn’t I just like to walk in here some day, and order old Tonker round?” said Elise, disregarding.  “I only hope she’ll hold out till I can!  Won’t I have a black silk suit as thick as a board, with fifteen yards in the kilting?  And a violet-gray, with a yard of train and Yak-flounces!”