o 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.

"I think this world is a kind of single-threaded machine, after all.
There's always something either too tight or too loose the minute
you double," she said, changing her tension-screw as she spoke. "No;
we've just got to make it up with cracker-frolics, the best way we
can; and that takes one more of somebody's nine dollars, every time.
There's some fun in it, after all, especially to see Matilda Meane
come to the table. I do believe that girl would sell her soul if she
could have a Parker House dinner every day. When it's a little
worse, or a little better than usual, when the milk gives out, or we
have a yesterday's lobster for tea,--I wish you could just see her.
She's so mad, or she's so eager. She _will_ have claw-meat; it _is_
claw-meat with her, sure enough; and if anybody else gets it first,
or the dish goes round the other way and is all picked over,--she
_looks_! Why, she looks as if she desired the prayers of the
congregation, and nobody would pray!"

"What _are_ you two laughing at?" broke in Kate Sencerbox, leaning
over from her table beyond. "Bel Bree, where are your crimps?"

In the ardor of her work, or talk, or both, Bel's hair, as usual,
had got pushed recklessly aside.

"O, I only have a little smile in my hair early in the morning,"
replies quick, cheery Bel. "It never crimps decidedly, and it all
gets straightened out prim enough as the day's work comes on. It's
like the grass of the field, and a good many other things; in the
morning it is fresh and springeth up; in the evening it _giveth_ up,
and is down flat."

"I guess you'll find it so," s