horrors; what she had actually seen
and felt had been mysteriously intensified a hundredfold by her violent
encounter with Colonel Dalhousie. For all that she knew, to this very
moment, the Works might be, indeed (as the beautifully tactful girl
Corinne had said), the best place to work in town.

But what Cally was thinking now was that, in sitting in judgment on her
father, she had blindly judged him as if he were a free man--she, of all
people, who had felt so poignantly the imprisoning powers of a groove.
Now it appeared, as by a sudden light upon him, that papa had always
been clamped fast in a groove of his own, exactly as she had been; a
groove fixed for him by his place in society, by the way other men ran
their cheroot factories,--for, of course, papa must do as his
competitors did, or be crowded out, and the hardest-driving, meanest man
set the pace for the kind ones, like papa,--and last and chiefly by the
extravagances of a wife and daughter who always cried "give, give," and
didn't care at all where the gifts came from. How could papa possibly be
free with two costly women on his back all the time?... Strange that she
hadn't grasped all this clearly, the minute she had recognized herself
as a horse-leech's daughter....

Now the first thing to do, obviously, was to get off papa's back at
once. Her fifty thousand dollars would be a sound starter there; of
course papa would take it, since she wanted him to so much. And her
mind, as she drove, kept recurring to this symbol, kept bringing up
pictures of the new Works that would be, built perfect with her money.
She saw it considerably like the beautiful marble palace of her
childhood's thought, the pride of Canal Street without, and within
wonderfully clean, spacious and airy, and most marvellously fragrant. In
this new palace of labor, faints and swoons were things undreamed of.
Trim, smiling, pretty girls, all looking rather like French maids in a
play, happily plied their light agreeable tasks; and, in especial, the
cheeks of poor Miller (who had stoutened gratifyingly) were observed to
blossom like the rose.

Yet the creator of all these wonders was well aware that she was not
giving her dowry to Miller, exactly....

Descending from the car at her own door, Cally encountered Mr. Pond, of
the Settlement. The dark-faced Director was loafing, oddly enough, on
Mrs. Mason's steps, which had once been Mr. Beirne's, four doors from
home. He raised his hat about