just now a sort of
enchanted palace, any one of whose rooms was delightful to contemplate.

"It's such a low, dirty place, I'm told, and there's so many common
women and girls there."

"Well, I needn't talk to them, I suppose. I needn't be common, at any
rate, and I can't get dirty in those great long-sleeved aprons and these
nice little caps. You don't know how smart I'm going to be, and won't
you be proud of your big girl when she brings home her first
three-dollar bill, all earned in one week? Eric will see that a girl's
worth something, after all, and Alfred sha'n't make fun of me any more."

Mrs. Robertson did not say anything else just now; she did not like to
be always checking the exuberance of her child's spirits with the dull
forebodings of her own, but she could not see the paper-mill through the
same halo that invested it in Katie's eyes. She knew there were snares
and temptations, besides disagreeable and hard work to be met and
encountered there, and she feared that the child's future disappointment
would be proportioned to the brightness of her present hopes. Still, as
the matter was determined upon, she knew it was right to make the best
of it, and she tried to talk pleasantly and at least seem to sympathize
with her daughter's enthusiasm.

So passed the day, and at night when the boys came home they were
called upon to listen for the hundredth time to all the rose-colored
plans, and were pressed to declare that there could be nothing in the
world more delightful than working in a factory.

But the boys could not see it in that light any more than their mother.
They were as content to work as are most men and boys who seem to take
it for granted that it is in the course of nature for them to earn their
bread by the sweat of their brow, but they had been at it long enough to
have lost the sense of novelty and to understand that it was work and
not play which their sister was undertaking.

"Won't you be sick of it!" said Alfred, in answer to one of Katie's
outbursts, "and long, when Saturday comes, to go out nutting with the
girls, or off on a hay-ride, or something! You'll wish you were free
before you've been a slave many months, or I'm no prophet."

"Well, she shall be free if she wants to," said Eric, kindly. "Our only
little sister sha'n't work if she don't want to; we can take care of
her, Alfred, can't we?"

"But I do want to work," said Katie; "I know I sha'n't get tired, or if
I do get t