She switched on the electricity and then went round blowing out the candles. By the time they were all out, Jean had worked up a disgust of herself that deceived the doctor.
"It's not less work that I need, but more. I haven't had a fight with Pedloe for a month, and the strike's so terribly settled I feel as if there was never going to be another dispute worth mentioning between capital and labor for the rest of my natural life."
"Cheer up. Society is beautifully rotten yet. Besides, just think of that talk you're scheduled for on—Municipal Housekeeping, I believe you said, Mrs. Herrick?"
"Garbage, Dr. MacLean, garbage, flies and infant mortality."
They laughed. "Jean, really we women are a scream, though no man would draw that out of me with red-hot pincers. Why, in the name of common sense, has everything got to be Housekeeping?"
"Because we've been locked up so long that we're afraid of the open. And we haven't got over the idea that we have to placate men, even yet, with a suffrage organization in every State. They still like to think of us, running between the cradle and the stove, so every mortal thing we do we've got to hitch up some way to a home. Decent milk, and the regulation of food prices, and garbage, divorce, child labor, widows' pensions, are all 'National Housekeeping,' and it sounds as if we had only moved into a larger house."
"Is that what you're going to tell them to-morrow? If it is, I'm going to stay right here and go, even if Third Cousin Nelly never speaks to me again. And she won't. I slipped out of it for Thanksgiving, and she's only got this one turkey left."
"You can go and eat it in peace, for I wouldn't have you at the meeting if you begged me on your knees. There are depths of depravity and duplicity in me that you have never guessed. You've never seen me being gracious."
"You weren't so bad to-day."
"Not a circumstance. A mere nothing to what I shall accomplish on Tuesday."