Her cough got no better. She asked for a transfer to the drawing room. The work of drawing the warp threads from the beam through the harness and reeds had to be done painstakingly by hand. The air was cleaner in the drawing room, and there was much less noise. Though the threading took skill, it did not take the physical strength demanded in the machine rooms, and the girls sat on high stools as they worked. The drawing room was a welcome change for Betsy, but the move came too late to help. The coughing persisted. She began to spend days in their bedroom, then the house infirmary, until, finally, when blood showed up in her phlegm, Mrs. Bedlow demanded that she be removed to the hospital.

On Sunday Lyddie went to see her, taking her botany text and a couple of novels that cost Lyddie twenty cents at the lending library.

“You’ve got to get me out of here,” Betsy said between fits of coughing. “They’ll bleed me of every penny I’ve saved.” But where could Betsy go? Mrs. Bedlow would not have her in the house, unwilling to bear the responsibility, and Dr. Morris had declared her too weak to travel to Maine to her uncle’s.

Lyddie wrote the brother. He was only in Cambridge—less than a day away by coach or train—but there was a three-week delay before he wrote to say that he was studying for his final examinations and would, perhaps, be able to come for a visit at the end of the term.

Betsy only laughed. “Well,” she said, “he’s our darling baby boy.” Then she fell to coughing. There was a red stain on her handkerchief.

“But you sent him all the way through that college of his.”

“Wouldn’t you do as much for your Charlie?”

“But Charlie is—” Lyddie was going to say “nice” and stopped herself just in time.

“Our parents are dead, and he’s the son and heir,” Betsy said as though that explained everything.

Betsy grew a little stronger as the weather warmed, and in April her uncle came to take her to Maine. By then her savings were gone, along with her good looks. “Keep my bed for me, Lyddie. I’ll be back next year to start all over again. Someday I’ll have enough money to go to college no matter how much the piece rate drops. I may be the oldest girl in the corporation before I have the money again, but if they let women into Oberlin at all, surely they won’t fuss about gray hair and a few wrinkles.”