These went
to three old ladies in the factory section of the village. She told me
they were "the sweetest old ladies" and "dear friends" of hers. She
seemed to take real delight in making the baskets beautiful. I saw her
later in the day galloping off through the woods on her horse, her face
glowing with health and happiness. In the afternoon she spent an hour on
German which she said was her "hopeless study," but I found her reading
German folk lore with ease. She was familiar with the best things in
literature, was intensely interested in art and revealed unusual
knowledge without any evidence of precociousness. She was just a normal,
healthy, natural girl, well-born, well-bred, a girl with every
advantage. When I said good-night to her in her lovely room and thought
of her protected, sheltered life, I wondered how she might be helped to
know into what pleasant places her lot had fallen and how she might come
to understand and do in later years her full duty toward the other
fifteen-year-old girl who that day made paper boxes, feathers, flowers
or shirtwaists, toiled in the laundries or the cotton factory, or walked
with heavy heart from place to place searching for work. They are
dependent upon one another, these two. They do not know it now, but if
each is to be her best, they must know.
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