d.
Then it would make a clutch with fingers of steel at the thread that
it had gathered, and waddle away about five yards and come back with
more.

It had mastered all the subtlety of skilled workers, and had
gradually displaced them; one thing only it could not do, it was
unable to pick up the ends if a piece of the thread broke, in order
to tie them together again. For this a human soul was required, and
it was Mary Jane's business to pick up broken ends; and the moment
she placed them together the busy soulless creature tied them for
itself.

All here was ugly; even the green wool as it whirled round and round
was neither the green of the grass nor yet the green of the rushes,
but a sorry muddy green that befitted a sullen city under a murky
sky.

When she looked out over the roofs of the town, there too was
ugliness; and well the houses knew it, for with hideous stucco
they aped in grotesque mimicry the pillars and temples of old
Greece, pretending to one another to be that which they were not.
And emerging from these houses and going in, and seeing the pretence
of paint and stucco year after year until it all peeled away, the
souls of the poor owners of those houses sought to be other souls
until they grew weary of it.

At evening Mary Jane went back to her lodgings. Only then, after the
dark had fallen, could the soul of Mary Jane perceive any beauty in
that city, when the lamps were lit and here and there a star shone
through the smoke. Then she would have gone abroad and beheld the
night, but this the old woman to whom she was confided would not let
her do. And the days multiplied themselves by seven and became
weeks, and the weeks passed by, and all days were the same. And all
the while the soul of Mary Jane was crying for beautiful things, and
found not one, saving on Sundays, when she went to church, and left
it to find the city greyer than before.

One day she decided that it was better to be a wild thing in the
lovely marshes, than to have a soul that cried for beautiful things
and found not one. From that day she determined to be rid of her
soul, so she told her story to one of the factory girls, and said to
her:

'The other girls are poorly clad and they do soulless work; surely
some of them have no souls and would take mine.'

But the factory girl said to her: 'All the poor have souls. It is
all they have.'

Then Mary Jane watched the rich whenever she saw them, and vainly
sought for