"Well, then," continued Edith, "we ought to have perfected ourselves in some accomplishment. They are always in demand. See what some French and music teachers obtain."
"Nonsense," said Zell pettishly, "you know well enough that by the time we were sixteen our heads were so full of beaux, parties, and dress, that French and music were a bore. We went through the fashionable mills like the rest, and if father had continued worth a million or so, no one would have found fault with our education."
"We can't help the past now," said Edith after a moment, "but I am not so old yet but that I can choose some kind of work and so thoroughly master it that I can get the highest price paid for that form of labor. I wish it could be gardening, for I have no taste for the shut-up work of woman; sitting in a close room all day with a needle would be slow suicide to me."
"Gardening!" said Zell contemptuously. "You couldn't plow as well as that snuffy old fellow who scratched your garden about as deeply as a hen would have done it. A woman can't dig and hoe in the hot sun, that is, an American girl can't, and I don't think she ought."
"Nor I either," said Mrs. Allen, with some returning vitality. "The very idea is horrid."
"But plowing, digging, and hoeing are not all of gardening," said
Edith with some irritation.
"I guess you would make a slim support by just snipping around among the rose-bushes," retorted Zell provokingly.
"That's always the way with you, Zell," said Edith sharply, "from one extreme to another. Well, what would you like to do?"
"If I had to work I would like housekeeping. That admits of great variety and activity. I wish I could open a summer boarding-house up here. Wouldn't I make it attractive!"
"Such black eyes and red cheeks certainly would—to the gentlemen," answered Edith satirically.