Free The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton by Robert J. Begiebing

read deeply, even in ethics and philosophy, and that those long hours spent dressing looms in the mills sharpened her memories of home.
    â€œYes,” she said in answer to a question, “within the brick walls, in the fatigue of desolate hours, I often recall the green fields, the bright living streams, the hills and mountains and forests.” I now understood that she had quite simply regulated her life both to necessity and self-cultivation. I asked whether she thought the effort required to do so a most extraordinary sort of heroism.
    â€œIt certainly is a labor of love,” she answered and laughed, “but I have found a number of capable young women in the mills, who have become my companions of the mind.”
    Tom, as I said, was so taken with her that I found it painful to watch him as she came and went in our small studio. He called on her, paid respects and the like, but she did not wish, finally, to spend her precious time on such doings. Her feelings about Tom I never knew for certain. But one thing became clear to me: that to establish her pattern of life, as well as to secure her mother and younger brother and sisters, Miss Parrie had come to protect certain renunciations. Her life—poor Tom!—had become a pursuit, whenever practicable, of other passions.
    Such a pattern of life I discovered more than once among these young women during my sojourn in Worcester County. Although no one else struck either Tom or me as having attained Miss Parrie’s quality of mind, my memories of her and several other women served later as beacons of the courage to live independently, even within the awful grip of Necessity. Now locked within my own brick walls, I often recalled especially two sisters who impressed me: the Misses Fiske, Tirzah and Harriet. The Fiske sisters ran their own millinery and tailoring shop. And as befit their business partnership, which they referred to as their sisterhood, I painted them together on a single 18-inch by 15-inch canvas.
    Raised in Sheepsheads Cairn, near Greenville, New Hampshire, they told me while sitting that after attending a female academy they came into Worcester together, worked for others briefly while establishing a modest clientele, and opened their shop as soon as they felt sufficiently established to do so. By the time I met them, they could barely keep up with all the work coming their way, had hired assistants for their busiest seasons, and had purchased a house together, where they lived in their extraordinary state of self-determination.
    â€œMother didn’t like it one bit,” Tirzah said the second day they sat demurely before my easel in their dark, unadorned gowns. “Particularly when we left together, you see.”
    â€œShe wished you to contribute to the farm by continuing there?” I asked.
    â€œAnd then to our own livelihood by marriage,” Harriet answered. “Especially mother. But father’s farm could barely support themselves and the youngest children, so we unquestionably, it seemed to us, had to find other work. After serving our apprenticeships and working long hours for low pay to the enrichment of others, it seemed a natural enough step, eventually, to devise a means of working instead for ourselves.”
    Harriet, the older, said that she and Tirzah had composed a long and loving letter to answer their mother, to plead their cause. “‘Can so loving a mother really believe that daughters are born to serve family until they marry and serve under the yoke of tippling husbands?’ we asked.”
    â€œPoor mother,” Tirzah said, laughing gently and smoothing the lap of her dress. “I’m afraid we were rather relentless in that epistle.”
    Tirzah, the younger and shorter of the two, was the prettier, her face more full, her eyes brighter. Harriet, they said, had during her apprenticeship undergone a terrible illness, and there was some shadow of that long struggle lingering