“Their father found the cocoon on a peach tree,” the mother explained, “and we have all been watching it ever since. They’re learning a lot from their gardens and chickens and explorations of the fields, that will give them a clearer view of things when the time comes for them to need it. Never a day goes now but I thank God that I am allowed to have my boys grow up on a farm.”
“I didn’t expect to find her like that,” Marjorie remarked when they left her, “so perfectly at ease and so sure of herself. She isn’t the average type of farm woman is she?”
“There isn’t any average type of farm woman,” Billy exclaimed. “They have the most individuality, are the least run in a conventional mould, of any class of women I know. This Mrs. Burns was a trained nurse before she was married. There are a dozen others just as fine and capable scattered through the neighborhood. The community doesn’t know much about them because they’re so everlastingly busy they can’t get away from home much.”
“Can’t they get help, or don’t they want to spend the money?”
“Some of them could afford help, but you can’t get a girl to work in the country. The city offers them good wages, and most of them have
an exaggerated idea of the inconvenience of a farm house from a woman’s standpoint. Naturally a girl prefers to work in a house where the water comes hot or cold from a faucet in an enamel sink, instead of where it has to be carried from a pump in the yard, where the washing is done with a power machine or sent to the laundry instead of being scrubbed out on a little zinc washboard, and a hundred other details that make the farm undesirable for a city girl.”
“And the lonesomeness of it! A girl who had lived in town would find it maddening.”
“But women like Mrs. Burns don’t find it lonely. They have grown up with country ideas, and they have a great deal in themselves—they can make their own entertainment; then they have a live interest in their homes and families, and the men in this community are generally a pretty fine lot.”
“Then why don’t they make things different for their wives?”
“Naturally that’s the first question a person would ask. Some of them don’t seem to care much, I’ll admit. A lot of them, though, are ambitious to have the very best things for their homes, but there are two hard rocks in the way. In the first place most farms don’t pay well enough to install big improvements and not many farmers know how to put in a low-cost equipment. Practically every farm that pays its way