“Will you get her out of here before I gag her with my bonnet ribbons and lash her to the bedpost?” Betsy said tightly, never taking her eyes off her own book.

“She can walk by herself. I got to read my book.” Lyddie stretched her hand to take the book back, but Amelia held it up just out of reach.

“Oh, come,” she said. “You’ve already read this book. I’ve seen you, and besides, it’s only a silly novel—not fit for reading, and a sin on the Sabbath—”

Lyddie could feel the gorge rising in her throat. Silly novel? It was life and death. “You ain’t read it,” she said, forgetting her grammar in her anger. “How can you know?”

Amelia flushed and her eyes blinked rapidly. She was no longer teasing. “I know about novels,” she said, her voice high and a little shaky. “They are the devil’s instrument to draw impressionable young minds to perdition.”

Lyddie stared at Amelia with her mouth wide open.

It was Betsy who spoke. “For pity’s sake, Amelia. Where did you ever hear such pompous nonsense?”

Amelia’s face grew redder. “You are unbelievers and scoffers, and I don’t see how I can continue to live in the same room with you.”

“Oh, hush.” Betsy’s tones were gentler than her words. “We do you no harm. Can’t we just live and let live?”

Amelia began to cry. Her chiseled marble features crumbled into the angry, helpless rage of a child. As Lyddie watched, she could feel the hardness inside herself breaking, like jagged cracks across granite.

She got a clean handkerchief from her own box and handed it to the older girl. “Here,” she said.

Amelia glanced quickly at the hanky—making sure it was a clean one, Lyddie thought wryly—but she murmured a thank you and blew her nose. “I don’t know what possessed me,” she said, more in her old tone.

“We’re all working like black slaves, is what,” said Betsy. “I’ve half a mind to sign the blooming petition.”

“Oh Betsy, you wouldn’t!” Amelia lifted her nose out of the handkerchief, her eyes wide.

“Wouldn’t I just? When I started in the spinning room, I could do a thirteen-hour day and to spare. But in those days I had a hundred thirty spindles to tend. Now I’ve twice that many at a speed that would make the devil curse. I’m worn out, Amelia. We’re all worn out.”

“But we’d be paid less.” Couldn’t Betsy understand that? “If we just work ten hours, we’d be paid much less.”

“Time is more precious than money, Lyddie girl. If only I had two more free hours of an evening—what I couldn’t do.”