st you say."

And Cally, five feet away from him, was learning that in some matters
the business logic of it didn't help very much, that what counted was
how you felt about them in your heart. If something terrible should
happen at the Works _now_, if the building did fall down some day,
collapsing with all those girls--did she think she could look again into
this man's eyes and say: "Well, _I_ had nothing to do with it?..."

But neither were her thoughts for publication; and she bridged the brief
gap in the conversation with a not particularly successful smile,
designed to show that of course nobody was taking all this very
seriously.

"But why expect to do what we want? No one can," said she. "You don't
mind my fidgeting about the room this way, do you? I seem a little out
of humor to-day--not myself at all, as I was told just now...."

V.V. said that he did not mind.

"I wonder," she went on, "if you remember something you said in your
speech the other day?--about being free.... It seemed strange to me
then, that you should have happened to say just that, for I--I've come
to realize that, in a kind of way, that's always been a wild dream of my
own.... Don't you think--where there are so many things to think about,
things and people--that it's pretty hard to be free?"

"Hard?... There's nothing else like it on earth for hardness."

V.V. stood grasping the back of an ancient walnut chair. It was seen
that he belonged in this room, simple home of poverty; different from
the girl, who was so obviously the rich exotic, the transient angel in
the house.

He added: "But it's always seemed to me worth all the price of trying."

"Oh, it is--I'm sure. And yet.... It seems to me--I've thought," said
Cally, somewhat less conversationally, "that life, for a woman,
especially, is something like one of those little toy theatres--you've
seen them?--where pasteboard actors slide along in little grooves when
you pull their strings. They move along very nicely, and you--you might
think they were going in that direction just because they wanted to. But
they never get out of their grooves.... I know you'll think that a--a
weak theory."

"No, I know it's a true theory."

Surely the girl could not have been thinking only of her father's
business as she went on, more and more troubled in voice:

"So much seems to be all fixed and settled, before one's old enough to
know anything about it--and then there's a great deal of press