"It has balked, refuses to turn up, and smells dreadfully."
"Bring in the plebeians, George," Fred cried gaily, "and
never mind the patrician--the forty-cent plebs never
fail. I told Jim Russell to bring his lantern, and Peter
can stand in a corner and light matches if we are short."
"It's working now," Edith called from the parlour, "burning
beautifully; mother drew her hand over it."
Soon the company began to arrive. Bashful, self-conscious
girls, some of them were, old before their time with the
marks of toil, heavy and unremitting, upon them,
hard-handed, stoop-shouldered, dull-eyed and awkward.
These were the daughters of rich farmers. Good girls they
were, too, conscientious, careful, unselfish, thinking
it a virtue to stifle every ambition, smother every
craving for pleasure.
When they felt tired, they called it laziness and felt
disgraced, and thus they had spent their days, working,
working from the gray dawn, until the darkness came again,
and all for what? When in after years these girls, broken
in health and in spirits, slipped away to premature
graves, or, worse still, settled into chronic invalidism,
of what avail was the memory of the cows they milked,
the mats they hooked, the number of pounds of butter they
made.
Not all the girls were like these. Maud Murray was there.
Maud Murray with the milkmaid cheeks and curly black
hair, the typical country girl of bounding life aid
spirits, the type so often seen upon the stage and so
seldom elsewhere.
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