"How is Pros, Johnnie?"
For nobody understood, as the crazed man in the hospital might have
done, that Laurella's bodily illness was but the cosmic despair of the
little girl who has broken her doll. It had been the philosophy of this
sun-loving, butterfly nature to turn her back on things when they got
too bad and take to her bed till, in the course of events, they bettered
themselves. But now she had emerged into a bleak winter world where
Uncle Pros was not, where Johnnie was powerless, and where she had been
allowed by an unkind Providence to work havoc with her own life and the
lives of her little ones; and her illness was as the tears of the girl
with a shattered toy.
The children in their broken shoes and thin, ill-selected clothing,
shivered on the roads between house and mill, and gave colour to the
statement of many employers that they were better off in the thoroughly
warmed factories than at home. But the factories were a little too
thoroughly warmed. The operatives sweated under their tasks and left the
rooms, with their temperature of eighty-five, to come, drenched with
perspiration, into the chill outside air. The colds which resulted were
always supposed to be caught out of doors. Nobody had sufficient
understanding of such matters to suggest that the rebreathed,
superheated atmosphere of the mill room was responsible.
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