Margaret left her, turning into the crowded street leading to the part
of the town where the factories lay. The throng of anxious-faced men and
women jostled and pushed, but she passed through them with a different
heart from yesterday's. Somehow, the morbid fancies were gone; she was
keenly alive; the homely real life of this huckster had fired her,
touched her blood with a more vital stimulus than any tale of crusader.
As she went down the crooked maze of dingy lanes, she could hear Lois's
little cracked bell far off: it sounded like a Christmas song to her.
She half smiled, remembering how sometimes in her distempered brain
the world had seemed a gray, dismal Dance of Death. How actual it
was to-day,--hearty, vigorous, alive with honest work and tears and
pleasure! A broad, good world to live and work in, to suffer or die, if
God so willed it,--God, the good! She entered the vast, dingy factory;
the woollen dust, the clammy air of copperas were easier to breathe in;
the cramped, sordid office, the work, mere trifles to laugh at; and she
bent over the ledger with its hard lines in earnest good-will,
through the slow creeping hours of the long day. She noticed that the
unfortunate chicken was making its heart glad over a piece of fresh
earth covered with damp moss.
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