without a shivering of walls and roof into naught but star-mediums
by his downrightness of vision. "Oh, let the child be, can't you,
Fanny?" he said, when his wife speculated whether Ellen would be or
do this or that when she should be a woman. He resented the
conception of the woman which would swallow up, like some
metaphysical sorceress, his fair little child. So when he now and
then led Ellen past the factories it was never with the slightest
surmise as to any connection which she might have with them beyond
the present one. "There's the shop where father works," he would
tell Ellen, with a tender sense of his own importance in his child's
eyes, and he was as proud as Punch when Ellen was able to point with
her tiny pink finger at the window where father worked. "That's
where father works and earns money to buy nice things for little
Ellen," Andrew would repeat, beaming at her with divine foolishness,
and Ellen looked at the roaring, vibrating building as she might
have looked at the wheels of progress. She realized that her father
was very great and smart to work in a place like that, and earn
money--so much of it. Ellen often heard her mother remark with pride
how much money Andrew earned.

To-night, when Ellen passed in her strange flight, the factories
were still, though they were yet blazing with light. The gigantic
buildings, after a style of architecture as simple as a child's
block house, and adapted to as primitive an end, loomed up beside
the road like windowed shells enclosing massive concretenesses of
golden light. They looked entirely vacant except for light, for the
workmen had all gone home, and there were only the keepers in the
buildings. There were three of them, representing three different
firms, rival firms, grouped curiously close together, but Lloyd's
was much the largest. Andrew and Eva worked in Lloyd's.