tell?"

"My dear Carmencita!" Stooping, the child's face was lifted and
kissed. "I'm not a bit interested in men or marriage. They belong
to--to a long, long time ago. I'm interested now in little girls like
you, and in boys, and babies, and gingham dresses, and Christmas
trees, and night classes, and the Dramatic School for the children who
work, and--"

"I'm interested in them, too, but I'm going to get married when I'm
big enough. I know you work awful hard down here, but it wasn't what
you were born for. I'm always feeling, right inside me, right
here"--Carmencita's hand was laid on her breast--"that you aren't
going to stay here long, and it makes an awful sink sometimes. You'll
go away and forget us, and get married, and go to balls and parties
and wear satin slippers with buckles on them, and dance, and I'd do
it, too, if I were you. Only--only I wish sometimes you hadn't come.
It will be so much harder when you go away."

"But I'm not going away." At the little white bureau in the plainly
furnished room of Mother McNeil's "Home," Frances stuck the pins
brought from the machine into the little cushion and nodded gaily to
the child now standing by her side. "I've tried the parties and balls
and--all the other things, and for a while they were very nice; and
then one day I found I was spending all my time getting ready for them
and resting from them, and there was never time for anything else. If
I had died it would not have mattered the least bit that I had lived.
And--"

"Didn't you have a sweetheart that it mattered to? Not even one?"