me and do well by you for half the money. We know
what homes are worth.' And wouldn't some of them think the
millennium was come? _I_ am going to try it."

Bel stopped. She did not think of such a thing as having made a
speech; she had only said a little--just as it came--of what she was
full of.

"You'll get packed in with a lot of dirty servants. You won't have
the home. You'll only have the work of it."

"No, Kate Sencerbox. I sha'n't do that; because I'm going to
persuade you to go with me. And we'll make the home, if they give us
ever so little a corner of it. And as soon as they find out what we
are, they'll treat us accordingly."

Kate Sencerbox shrugged her shoulders.

"The world isn't going to be made all over in a day,--nor Boston
either; not if it _is_ all burnt up to begin with."

"That is true, Kate," said Desire Ledwith. "You will have
difficulties. But you have difficulties now. And wouldn't it be
worth while to change these that are growing worse, for such as
might grow better? Wouldn't it be grand to begin to make even a
little piece of the world over?"

"We could start with new people," said Bel. "Young people. They are
the very ones that have the hardest time with the old sort of
servants. We could go out of town, where the old sort won't stay.
You see it's _homes_ we're after; real ones; and to help make them;
and it's homes they hate!"

"Where did you find it all out, Bel?"

"I don't know. Talk; and newspapers. And it's in the air."

Bel was her old, quick, bright, earnest self, taking hold of this
thing that she so truly meant. She turned round to it eagerly,
escaping from the thoughts which she resolutely flung out of her
mind. There was perhaps a slight impetus of this hurry of escape in
her eagerness. But Bel was strong; strong in her purity; in her real
poet-nature, that reached for and demanded the real soul of living;
in her incapacity to care for the shadow or pretense,--far more the
_sullied_ sham,--of anything. Contempt of the evil had come swiftly
to cure the sting of the evil. Satan would fain have had her, to
sift her like wheat; but she had been prayed for; and now that she
was saved, she was inspired to strengthen her sisters.

"I don't think I could do anything but sewing," said Emma Hollen,
plaintively. "I'm not strong enough. And ladies won't see to their
own sewing, now, in their houses. It's so much easier to go right
into Feede & Treddle's, and buy ready-made, tha