"Oh! Yes. That is what they used to have, in old times, when we lived at home with mother. Only they didn't write articles about it. All the women in a house co-operated—to keep it; and all the neighborhood co-operated—by living exactly in the same way. Nowadays, it's co-operative shirking; isn't it?"
One never could quite tell whether Mrs. Hobart was more simple or sharp.
That was all that was said about co-operative housekeeping at the time. But Ruth remembered the conversation. So did Barbara, for a while, as appeared in something she came out with a few days after.
"I could—almost—write a little poem!" she said, suddenly, over her work. "Only that would be doing just what the rest do. Everything turns into a poem, or an article, nowadays. I wish we'd lived in the times when people did the things!"
"O Barbara! Think of all that is being done in the world!"
"I know. But the little private things. They want to turn everything into a movement. Miss Trixie says they won't have any eggs from their fowls next winter; all their chickens are roosters, and all they'll do will be to sit in a row on the fence and crow! I think the world is running pretty much to roosters."
"Is that the poem?"
"I don't know. It might come in. All I've got is the end of it. It came into my head hind side before. If it could only have a beginning and a middle put to it, it might do. It's just the wind-up, where they have to give an account, you know, and what they'll have to show for it, and the thing that really amounts, after all."
"Well, tell us."
"It's only five lines, and one rhyme. But it might be written up to. They could say all sorts of things,—one and another:—