e
represented the total wages of four or five hundred able-bodied men and
women, such as these, who worked from ten to sixteen hours a day for
three hundred days each year, when they could, and all told earned
hardly what she drew by signing her name to slips of paper as income
from her property during the same space of time. He said to her,--"You
can think that you are worth about four hundred human lives! Who talks
about slavery being abolished? Hell!" She had thought then that his way
of putting it was quite wrong, unjust: she was sure that Major Pound
could easily have disposed of his contention. Indeed, she had heard the
major and men like him maintain that capitalists like herself were the
only true benefactors of humanity, that without them the working-people
could never be fed! But to-day she was not sure that her cousin had been
wrong. She saw a concrete proof of his statement in this stream of
poorly nourished, hard-worked men, women, boys, and girls, all toiling
to maintain themselves and pay her the interest upon the crowded land of
Clark's Field. In a very definite sense they were all working for her;
they were her slaves!

The younger women and girls looked into the judge's brougham curiously
or impudently, attracted by the spectacle of leisure and quiet richness
that Adelle presented, a sight not commonly afforded them in the streets
of Clark's Field and always fascinating to women of any class wherever
it may be. Adelle's dress was plain black, and she had shed much of her
jewelry; but beneath her simple gown and fine linen and carefully
cherished skin she began to feel a new sensation, not exactly pity for
these less lucky sisters, rather wonder that it should all be so, that
she should be sitting there in idleness and comfort and they should be
tramping the pavement of Clark's Field to the factory....

When she saw the boys playing in the mud puddle in the one vacant lot,
she thought of her own little boy, on whom she had lavished every care,
every luxury. So with these working-girls, she thought how easily she
might have been one of them going from the rooming-house in Church
Street to shop or factory, as many women of better Puritan families than
hers had done. It was pure accident, she could see, why she and her
child had been saved from such a lot--due neither to her own ability nor
that of any of her Clark forbears! It was a humbling perception.

"Hell!" her cousin was saying explosively, "these