“Any one who amounts to anything stays in his head. He’s not complicated by _souls_. All the comfortable, solid world calls you absurd for what you say and the way you look, when this Eastern stuff starts you going. You get so absorbed that you lose all touch with things down here, the things you are really here to do. You stop making money and go around saying the Lord will provide. You don’t really let Him, you let other people support you and call it God’s work. You call yourself the Elect, and yet you can’t do the things that average people do. Mainly, you talk. You stop work to talk. You settle heaven and God and the soul with talk!... Oh, Dicky, that’s why I hate it all so; that’s why I’d rather be a factory girl; that’s why I’m all lame and tired about ‘ideals’ and ‘supermen’ and ‘abstractions’--because I’ve heard so much talk.... It’s the first thing I remember. Lying in the crib--I began to hear my father’s voice.” “But you’ve got all this stuff, Pidge. That’s what makes you--makes you----” “It is what makes me nothing! It is what keeps me from being an honest-to-God mill girl. It is what keeps me from everything that means something to other mill girls. It is what keeps me from taking life as I find it. It’s what spoils me from really knowing Miss Claes or Nagar--or what they are about--because so many words have been dinned into my ears before coming to New York.” The hardest thing on Dicky these days was that Pidge had to work in a factory. This thought was never far from the central arena of his mind. It chafed and irked. There was very little of the philanderer in his breed. Mostly, the Cobdens had chosen their women carefully, after long, cool, studious courtship. Having decided, courted and married, nothing short of death could break in. Doubtless Dicky’s fidelity was as stable as that of his relatives, even though his heart had not turned so cautiously to his light of day. Pidge had risen in his heavens and possessed them like the rising sun. There were not two suns in his system. He had meant to live lean down in Harrow Street, but his idea of that wasn’t native to the locality. His ramifications for keeping clean were considerable and very disturbing to Pidge Musser, who had been brought up in Southern California to wear a few white garments which she could wash herself. Washing was impossible in her room, and wasn’t at all easy in the hall below where Miss Claes had told her to get her water.