“Naughty Belle!” cried her mother.

“Never naughty when you coax, mamma.  I’d have been a saint if they’d only taken your tactics with me, but they didn’t know enough, thank fortune, so I had my fun.  If they had only looked at me as you do, and put me on my honor, and appealed to my better feelings and all that, and laughed with me and at me now and then, I’d been fool enough to have kept every rule.  You always knew, mamma, just how to get me right under your thumb, in spite of myself.”

“I hope I may always keep you there, my darling, in spite of this great evil world, out into which you wish to go.  It is not under my thumb, Belle, but under my protecting wing that I wish to keep you.”

“Dear little mother,” faltered the warm-hearted girl, her eyes filling with tears, “don’t you see I’ve grown to be too big a chicken to be kept under your wing?  I must go out and pick for myself, and bring home a nice morsel now and then for the little mother, too.  Yes, I admit that I want to go out into the world.  I want to be where everything is bright and moving.  It’s my nature, and what’s the use of fighting nature?  You and Millie can sit here like two doves billing and cooing all day.  I must use my wings.  I’d die in a cage, even though the cage was home.  But never fear, I’ll come back to it every night, and love it in my way just as much as you do in yours.  You must put me in a store, mamma, where there are crowds of people going and coming.  They won’t do me any more harm than when I used to meet them in the streets, but they’ll amuse me.  My eyes and hands will be busy, and I won’t die from moping.  I’ve no more education than a kitten, but shop-girls are not expected to know the dead languages, and I can talk my own fast enough.”

“Indeed you can!” cried Mildred.

“But, Belle,” said her mother, who was strongly inclined toward Mildred’s idea of seclusion until fortune’s wheel had turned, “how will you like to have it known in after years that you were a shopgirl?”

“Yes,” added Mildred, “you may have to wait on some whom you invited to your little company last spring.  I wish you could find something to do that would be quiet and secluded.”

“Oh, nonsense!” cried Belle impatiently.  “We can’t hide like bears that go into hollow trees and suck their paws for half a dozen years, more or less”—­Belle’s zoological ideas were startling rather than accurate—­“I don’t want to hide and cower.  Why should we?  We’ve done nothing we need be ashamed of.  Father’s been unfortunate; so have hundreds and thousands of other men in these hard times.  Roger showed me an estimate, cut from a newspaper, of how many had failed during the last two or three years—­why, it was an army of men.  We ain’t alone in our troubles, and Roger said that those who cut old acquaintances because they had been unfortunate were contemptible snobs, and the sooner they were found out the better; and I want