Both children quailed before him, each prepared regardless of its merits, for acquittal or condemnation, as he might decide the issue. Even Mrs. Denbigh drew back and set her lips to silence. The giant raised a threatening hand. "Be ye ahl gone deef?" he demanded. "Whad's ahl this devil's racket fur?" In a panic of self-preservation, the two girls began at once to clamor forth their woes. "Sallie won't wash the dishes!" cried Mary. "I'm sick," sobbed Sarah, "an' mom says Mary must wash 'em because she upset the stew this noon-time!" In the merits of any case brought before him, the household Solomon was as little interested as if he had been the judge of a law-court. His years of overwork had limited his sense of a just division of toil among others, and his long oppression by task-masters had made himself a merciless task-master. Like the men that had driven him, he delighted most in driving those who were the hardest to drive. Sallie was too young to furnish appreciable resistance, but in the awakening Mary he now saw something that approached worthy opposition. He turned first to his wife. "Did you tell 'er," he inquired, his stubby forefinger leveled at Mary--"did you tell 'er to wash 'un?" Mrs. Denbigh bowed her sweating forehead in timid assent. Then the father looked again at the offender. "Wash 'un!" he ordered, and marched back to his parlor, his armchair, and his evening paper. Mary knew her father too well not to know also the price of disobedience. Sullenly, but without hesitation, she retreated to the little kitchen and took up her uncongenial task. Girlhood, then, must be denied much of its claim to recreation; the social machine was pitiless. Young life was a period of menial service from which the sole escape was marriage, whether to stranger or to friend. That a stranger should harm her was, to Mary--as it is to most girls of her age and environment--an idea unentertained: strangers were too few, and the world of moral fact too closely shut and guarded. Boys she had always been cautioned against in vague generalities; but she understood that they were prohibited because their company was a delectable luxury reserved for older and marriageable girls whose younger sisters were needed only to help in the household tasks.