That was the way she said it to herself. She really thought of Dot especially and first; for it would be her doing if her sister were bound and hampered in any way; and even though Dot were willing, could she see clear to decide upon an undertaking that would involve the seven best years of the child's life, in which "who knew what might happen?" She did not look straight in the face her own possibilities, yet she said simply in her own mind, "A woman ought to leave room for that. It might be cheating some one else, as well as herself, if she didn't." And she saw very well that a woman could not marry and assume family ties, with a seven years' lease of a bakehouse and a seven years' business on her hands. "Why--he might be a--anything," was the odd little wording with which she mentally exclaimed at this point of her considerations. And if he were anything,--anything of a man, and doing anything in the world as a man does,--what would they do with two businesses? The whole vexed question solved itself to her mind in this home-fashion. "It isn't natural; there never will be much of it in the world," she said. "Young women, with their real womanhood in them, won't; and by the time they've lived on and found out, the chances will be over. To do business as a man does, you must choose as a man does,--for your whole life, at the beginning of it." Ray Ingraham, with all her capacity and courage, at this turning-point where choice was given her, and duty no longer showed her one inevitable way, chose deliberately to be a woman. She took up a woman's lot, with all its uncertainty and disadvantage; the lot of _working for others_. "I can find something simply to do and to be paid for; that will be safe and faithful; that will leave room." She said something like that to Frank Sunderline, when he sat talking with her over some building accounts one evening. He had come in as a friend and had helped them in many little ways; beside having especial occasion in this matter, as representing his own employer who held a small demand against the estate. "I am too young," she told him. "Dot is too young. I should feel as if I _must_ have her with me if I kept on, and we should need to keep all the little money together. How can I tell what Dot--how can I tell what either of us"--she changed her word with brave honesty, "might have a wish for, before seven years were over? If I were forty years old, and could do it, I would; I would take girls for journeymen,--girls who wanted work and pay; then they would be brought up to a very good business for women, if they came to want business and they would be free, while they _were_ girls, for happier things that might happen." "That is good Woman's Rights doctrine; it doesn't leave out the best right of all."