The hang of faded clothes pained her eyes.
"And they have to work so hard!" was her only comment.
On the street sometimes she would see men working--Irishmen with picks, coal-heavers with great loads to shovel, Americans busy about some work which was a mere matter of strength--and they touched her fancy.

Toil, now that she was free of it, seemed even a more desolate thing than when she was part of it.

She saw it through a mist of fancy--a pale, somber half-light, which was the essence of poetic feeling.

Her old father, in his flour dusted miller's suit, sometimes returned to her in memory, revived by a face in a window.

A shoemaker pegging at his last, a blast man seen through a narrow window in some basement where iron was being melted, a bench-worker seen high aloft in some window, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up; these took her back in fancy to the details of the mill.