“Or if you were an easy prey to the hoodlum element hanging around almost every country village, you possibly found your recreation in shooting peas from the back seat of the church at tea-meetings, or cutting harness, or stretching wires across the road on dark nights. When you reached the age of more civil instincts the most alluring social interest was to follow the public
balls from one end of the country to the other. You met the same people, or the same class of people, night after night, and you stayed till four o’clock in the morning. Before it was done half the men would be glazed-eyed and unsteady, and the girls looking dragged out, but sort of tolerating it all; and some of them the best girls in the country, too. They must have gone home heart-sick of it, but they always came back; you can’t wonder much—there was a lot they didn’t know and there wasn’t any other excitement in their lives. A minister in the village here ventured the idea of fitting up a gymnasium in the basement of the church and having moving pictures on Wednesday nights, but one old reprobate of an elder opposed it until it was dropped. He considered it profanity in the first degree, and anyway he didn’t want his daughter going to picture shows or dressing up in gymnasium rigs, but every time she came down to the post office, a new arrival in the village who had come to open a pool-room over the carriage-shop, a social and moral worm, as every man in the place knew, walked part way home with her. She wouldn’t have tolerated him a minute if she could have seen him in comparison with decent men, but her father didn’t believe in the “safety in numbers” fact. She ran away with the pool promoter and married him, and all the time there were a dozen honest, well-intentioned fellows
native to the farms around, any one of whom she might just as possibly have married, but didn’t for the very good reason that she didn’t know them. I believe this co-education venture will be the best move yet in the ‘rural sociology’ scheme.”
“Well, then, before your enthusiasm cools, I wish you’d go and take a look at the hall we have to fix up for a demonstration kitchen.”
Billy looked at the hall and reported. The next day he brought his tools, and according to directions improvised a table from some rough lumber, nailed some boxes together for a cupboard, then swept out his shavings and incidentally the dust from a year’s meetings of the county council. On the third day he was commissioned to meet the train bringing the teacher.
Billy was not given to questioning orders, but he stopped unloading chairs from a wood-rack to look his chief over with open defiance.
“I’ll do anything in reason,” he said. “I’ll haul the furniture from any part of the county till we get the place equipped. I’ll blacken the stove or scrub the floor if I have to, but I don’t feel at all equal to meeting any post-graduate domestic science girl and escorting her up to the Royal Hotel. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d sit right down on the steps and cry.”
“More likely to sit right down and give you five minutes to find a better place or get a taxi to take her home.”
“Only that there isn’t any better place.”
“Why won’t some of the women take her?”