y as in a
house.

Indeed, when all is said and done, the sound of the work which women were
presently doing at New Bethel was only an echo of the tasks which women
had done during four years of war, and being a repetition of history, it
didn't surprise Mary when she stopped to think it over. But looking back
at the whole experience later, these were the two reflections which
interested her the most.

"They have always called woman a riddle," she thought. "I wonder if that
is because she could never be natural. If woman has been a riddle in the
past, I wonder if this is the answer now...."

That was her first reflection.

Her second was this, and in it she unconsciously worded one of the great
lessons of life. "The things I worried about seldom happened. It was
something which nobody ever dreamed of--that nearly ended everything."

And when she thought of that, her breath would come a little quicker and
soon she would shake her head, and try to put her mind on something else;
although if you had been there I think you would have seen a suspicious
moisture in her eye, and if she were in her room at home, she would go to
a photograph on the wall-the picture of a gravely smiling girl on a
convent portico--signed "With all my love, Rosa."

Still, as you can see, I am running ahead of my story, and so that you
may better understand Mary's two reflections and the events which led to
them, I will now return to the morning when she received Archey's message
that every man in the factory had gone on strike as a protest against the
employment of women.

As soon as she reached the office she sent a facsimile letter to the
skilled women workers who had applied from out of town.

"If we only get a third of them," she thought, "we'll pull through
somehow."

But Mary was reckoning without her book. For one thing, she was unaware
of the publicity which her experiment was receiving, and for another
thing perhaps it didn't occur to her that the same yearnings, the same
longings, the same stirrings which moved her own heart and mind so
often--the same vague feeling of imprisonment, the same vague groping for
a way out--might also be moving the hearts and minds of countless other
women, and especially those who had for the first time in their lives
achieved economic independence by means of their labour in the war.

Whatever the reason, so many skilled women journeyed to New Bethel that
week, coming with the glow of crusaders, e