Yet who could not understand a mother’s desire to see her children dressed prettily, when it cost only a few hours more time, a little more fatigue to make them so? and how few are able to blend beauty and strict simplicity, although when it is blended the result is more charming than any dictate of fashion?
“Let me help you iron for an hour. We need not begin cooking just yet, if you saved the mutton broth, as there is no gravy to make.”
“Yes, I saved it, but you mustn’t think of ironing,—please don’t.”
“I’d like it. I am not expert, but every little helps, and your instruction will do me good. Let me go on with that ruffle, while you get something I can’t do. My Marta is ironing to-day, but by the look of things I’m afraid I shall have to learn, myself, in order to teach her, if she proves teachable.”
“Ironing I have learned to do pretty well from necessity. I only wish I had been brought up to do everything, it would all have come so much easier to me.”
“But it seems to me you can do so many things well,” said Molly. “You sew so beautifully, and this ironing would shame most people who have been brought up to do it.”
“Yes, I can do anything I make up my mind to do; so can most people, I think.”
“Yes, and that is why if an educated woman is forced into unaccustomed fields of work she does it better than those who are professedly working-women,—better in every case where sinew is not the chief desideratum.”
“Only,” rejoined Mrs. Lennox, “she works with brains and hands too, and that is why the work tires her so much more than those who work mechanically.”
“I suppose so. I am a strong young woman and have never known a day’s sickness, yet I am tired to death after a couple of hours in the kitchen, while Marta, who has been doing the hard work and has been on her feet hours longer, is fresh, and has to go on working while I can rest. Yet that thought makes me very tolerant of a servant’s shortcomings, seeing my own limitations.”