Beside the factory and near to it ground had been broken and a foundation laid for a building about which people, especially mothers, spoke in hushed voices. "It can't be true," Liza Hope had said to Mrs. Tansey Moore one day as they dropped in to Theodore Starr's church to take breath and a dip of snuff. "A Home-school! that's what the Cup-o'-Cold-Water Lady said it was, and when I axed her to say it plainer and not so polite, she done 'splain as how the chillens, our chillens, war to be gathered in from everywhere--even factories,--and teached and--and mothered! That's her word--mothered!" "Don't them-all think us-all is--mothers?" Mrs. Moore sniffed contemptuously. "Us as borned them reckons we-all is mothers." "But it's this-er-way." Liza was Marcia Lowe's interpreter to the cabin-folk and was gradually drawing them to the point where more than one had gone voluntarily to Trouble Neck and, after a chat and a cup of tea, had uttered the mystic word "youcum," which meant, "you call on me." No higher honour could a mountain woman bestow than this! But Mrs. Tansey Moore had never taken the little doctor up socially. "It's this-er-way. We-all can't act out what's in us-all. You know, Rose-Lily"--Mrs. Moore had one of the funeral-design names which so often decorated the plainest of her sex among the hills--"we-all just get caught in the wheels and go round like what we-all have to. I reckon you wouldn't have let your Sammy-Jo into the factory if the heart of you could ha' spoke. Seems like yesterday when I saw them-all totin' Sammy-Jo up The Way to kiss you good-bye, an' him only ten years old an' dyin' o' the hurt o' the wheels." Rose-Lily bowed her head on her work-roughened hands and sobbed miserably. "An' I reckon I wouldn' ha' let my po' lil' half-wit chile go--if I could ha' helped it. When Mason licked him down The Way o' mornin' it made the soul o' me sick. When the factory burned I thanked A'mighty God for, starvin' or not starvin,' the po' lil' feller couldn't go! The night he died in Miss Lowe's cabin when she war tryin' her charm on him--I jes' war right glad, for the factory down to The Forge war jes' about done and I war thankful he couldn't get caught in the wheels agin! I tell yo', Rose-Lily, the mother in us-all don't get a chance in The Hollow, but the Cup-o'-Cold-Water Lady don' say things is goin' to be different. She 'lows that the Home-school will jes' make up to us-all for what's been denied." Mrs. Moore moaned softly and shook her head. "It don't sound--earthly!" she muttered.