“Just that nine women out of ten in these parts don’t have time to bring up their children; that if they were given half the care you give the milk critters the young ones would have a better chance to start with. The air may be good enough in the fields, but it’s no elixir after it’s been shut up all day in a house so badly heated that you have to keep the windows down tight to keep things from freezing. Did you ever see where they slept in there? A little room off the kitchen just big enough for a bed and the window
frozen down from summer to summer. I told Brown the danger, but he reckoned he got enough fresh air out doors all day, and if his wife had a cough it was no place for her in a draught. Besides, he said, she was prowling around so late at night sewing for the kids that the little time she was in bed didn’t matter much. Now he’s afraid he’s caught it from her, but he hasn’t. He’s in too healthy a shape to catch anything. It’s different with a woman, spent with the children coming and the long hours and the work that you couldn’t hire a girl to do. I’m not so sure of the children being safe; they’re none too strong to start with.”
The young man resented this.
“Ain’t you pretty hard on Brown?” he demanded. “You won’t find a harder workin’ or a kinder man to his family anywhere; nor a woman more contented or that took more pride in her home than she did. I don’t like to hear him talked about as if he was to blame for this. Nor she wouldn’t.”
The doctor’s eyes wandered up to the window with its patched, starched curtains, and row of tomato cans holding weary-looking geraniums. There were new coverings of wall-paper around the tins—a pitiful reminder of a woman’s struggle to keep her house to the last.
“No, she wouldn’t,” he agreed quietly. “She thought the sun rose and set on Jim and the
kids.... And I’m not blaming him. He thought this driving and saving now was going to make things easier later on, and he just got the habit and couldn’t stop. What you all need around here is a little more physiological common sense. How’s Hazel?”
The question seemed ill-timed.
“First rate,” the husband answered. “She’s over there.”
The doctor looked over to the girl who a year ago had left the smoke of the town for the haven of the green country. The plume in her chiffon hat sagged a little; her wedding dress hung a bit limp, her face seemed noticeably pale through the tan. Altogether, to his professional eye, she didn’t look as well as when she left the town.