"
Elizabeth looked at her gratefully, and wrote her down in the list of
saints with the woman who read the fourteenth chapter of John. The old
lady had neglected to mention that from her own meagre wardrobe she had
supplied some under-garments, which were not included in those the
boarders had left.
Bathed and clothed in clean, sweet garments, with a white shirt-waist and
a dark-blue serge skirt and coat, Elizabeth looked a different girl. She
surveyed herself in the little glass over the box-washstand and wondered.
All at once vanity was born within her, and an ambition to be always thus
clothed, with a horrible remembrance of the woman of the day before, who
had promised to show her how to earn some pretty clothes. It flashed
across her mind that pretty clothes might be a snare. Perhaps they had
been to those girls she had seen in that house.
With much good advice and kindly blessings from the old lady, Elizabeth
fared forth upon her journey once more, sadly wise in the wisdom of the
world, and less sweetly credulous than she had been, but better fitted to
fight her way.
The story of her journey from Chicago to Philadelphia would fill a volume
if it were written, but it might pall upon the reader from the very
variety of its experiences. It was made slowly and painfully, with many
haltings and much lessening of the scanty store of money that had seemed
so much when she received it in the wilderness.
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