Clarissa dropped her iron and confronted him dramatically.
"Doubtless--if I could afford to pay her," she responded. "As you are already aware, the salary of associate professors in the Midwest University is fourteen hundred dollars a year. When steak was a shilling a pound {132} and eggs fifteen cents a dozen and the washerwoman asked a dollar a day, one could afford to have her help longer. Now it is different."
Professor Charleroy moved quietly over to the ironing-board and put the flatiron, which was still hot enough to scorch, upon its stand. Then he arranged, in a glass, the handful of daffodils he was carrying, and set them where the April sunshine fell across them.
"Yes, I know it is different," he said gloomily. "But it may be different again if I can place my text-book. When we married, Clarissa, I thought your own little income would be sufficient to protect you from such economies as I knew would be most distasteful to you--but, somehow, it--it does n't seem to do it."
"It goes," returned Clarissa. "I don't {133} know how it goes, but it does. I dare say I'm not a good manager. It is n't as if I dressed well, for I don't. But I would n't mind, if we could go to Chicago for a week of music and theatres in the spring. But we can't do anything but live--and that is n't living! Something is wrong with the whole system of woman's work in the world. I don't know what it is, but I mean to find out. Somebody has got to do something about it."
She threw back her small blonde head as she spoke, and it was as if she gave the universe and all its powers warning that she did not purpose to live indefinitely under such an ill-arranged order of things as they were maintaining. Let the universe look to itself!
"I met Baumgarten of the Midwest Ice Company on the campus. He says {134} if this weather holds, he will start his ice-wagons to-morrow," suggested her husband anxiously. He had very definite reasons for wishing to divert Clarissa from consideration of all the things that are out of joint in the world.
"Ice is a detail. Sometimes details do help," admitted Clarissa, fanning her blazing cheeks.
"We will have Jacob come and wash the windows and put on the screens in the morning," he continued very gently. "And I will uncover the roses and rake the beds this afternoon. I should have done it last week, but no one could forsee this weather."
"I'm not ready for Jacob until I have been through the closets. They must be cleaned first.--I hate to clean closets! I hate to cook, to sew, to iron, to dust, to scrub! There are women who {135} like these occupations. Let such people assume them!"