did Katie think
would be becoming to her? How would she have it made? how trimmed?

"I'll tell you what, Katie," she said, "let's take our money when we get
it and get silks exactly alike; then we can wear them to Sunday-school
together, and the other girls will see that it isn't so mean to be
factory-girls after all. Even Miss Mountjoy herself can wear nothing
finer than silk, if she does always look so stuck up."

But Katie failed to be infected with a desire for a silk dress. She had
never worn anything but the plainest and poorest clothes, though they
had always been whole, clean, and neatly made; her temptations did not
lie in that line. She had insisted on beginning to work in order to help
her mother support the family, and to make it a little easier for them
all to get along. She admired pretty things, of course, as all girls do,
but she had an intuitive feeling that Sunday-school was not the place in
which to show off fine clothes. Bertie's chatter did not please her, and
though they were old friends, or rather companions, having been to both
school and Sunday-school together for some years, she was glad when they
parted at the corner house, which had once been the doctor's, and she
could go home to her mother.

For the little girl was tired by this time; she had got up much earlier
than usual and had been on her feet all day, and besides the reaction of
so much excitement, even though it had been of a pleasurable nature, was
calculated to produce depression. Her mother was out when she got home,
and there was nobody to welcome her but the gray cat, which did so,
however, with the loudest of purrings, and the lounge in the warm room
looked so comfortable that the tired little worker took pussy in her
arms, lay down there, and began to think. She was not quite satisfied
with her "first day." The factory was quite as nice as she had expected,
and Mr. James was nicer; but had she remembered "in _all_ her ways to
acknowledge God" and "to do all to his glory"? She was afraid not; she
had broken the rules once, and had listened to Bertie's chatter, while a
desire had arisen in her heart, not for a silk dress, but for plenty of
money, for a fine home, for a piano, and all the things that some girls
had, and she had been tempted to think it hard that some people should
have so much and some so little. Was God quite just to let it be so?

But, as she lay upon the lounge, rested by its soft cushions, warmed by
the fi