"Come in!" called Mrs. Green, who was sitting by the kitchen table, in the patch of sunlight before the window, sewing together strips of bright cloth and winding them into balls for a rag carpet. "You, Hagar? Come right in! Well, March is surely going out like a lion!" "It's so windy that the clouds are running like sheep," said Hagar. She took a small, split-bottom rocking-chair, drew it near Mrs. Green, and began to wind carpet rags. "Red and blue and grey--it's going to be a beautiful carpet! Have you heard from Thomasine?" Mrs. Green rose and took a letter from behind the clock. "Read it. She's been to a theatre and the Eden Musée and Brooklyn Bridge, and she's going to visit the Statue of Liberty." Hagar read five pages of lined notepaper, all covered with Thomasine's pretty, precise writing. "She's having a good time.... I wish I were there, too. I've never seen New York." "Never mind! You will one day," said Mrs. Green. "Yes, Thomasine's having a good time. Jim was born generous." "Is she really going to work if he can get her a place?" "Yes, child, she is. Times seems to me to be gettin' harder right along instead of easier. Girls have got to go out in the world and work nowadays, just the same as boys. I don't know as it will hurt them; anyway, they've got to do it. Food an' clothes don't ask which sect you belong to." "Thomasine ought to have gone to school. Girls can go to college now, and Thomasine and I both ought to have gone to college." "Landsake!" said Mrs. Green. "Ain't you been to college for going on three years?" But Hagar shook her head. "No. Eglantine wasn't exactly a college. I ought to have gone to a different kind of place. Thomasine likes books, too." "Yes, she likes them, but she don't like them nothing like as much as you do. But Thomasine's a good child and mighty refined. I hope Jim'll take pains to get her a place where they are nice people. He means all right, but there! men don't never quite understand." "I wish I could earn money," said Hagar. "I wish I could." Mrs. Green regarded her over her spectacles. "A lot of women have wished that, child. A lot of women have wished it, and then again a lot of women haven't wished it. Some would rather do for themselves an' for others an' some would rather be did for, and that's the world. I've noticed it in men, too." "It's in my head all the time. I think mother put it there--"