Miss Thorley took up a handful of brushes and regarded them intently before she said slowly: "Independence is the greatest thing in the world, Mary Rose. It means that I can live as I choose, where I choose, that I can pay my own bills, buy my own clothes and food, that I can do exactly as I please and as I think best. The independence of women is the most wonderful thing in this wonderful age."
Mary Rose looked puzzled. Mr. Jerry had not spoken of it as if it were such a wonderful thing. She looked around the pretty room with its simple furnishings and then at Miss Thorley.
"Does it mean you aren't ever going to be married?" she asked doubtfully. In Mifflin all the girls as big as Miss Thorley meant to be married.
"It means exactly that." Miss Thorley's pretty lips were pressed closer together. "Work, Mary Rose, is the most important thing in life."
But Mary Rose was horrified. "Aren't you ever going to make a home for a family?" she cried. She couldn't believe that was what Miss Thorley meant and she dropped a jam jar. "You don't have to stop work to do it," she cried eagerly and helpfully after she had retrieved the jar. "Mrs. Evans, she's Gladys' mother, says she'd think the millennium was here if she didn't have any work to do. She has five children at home and three in the cemetery." Miss Thorley shuddered. "She can cook and sew and sweep and play the piano and she belongs to the Woman's Club and the Missionary Society and the Revolution Daughters and the Presbyterian Church. You don't ever have to stop working to make a home for a family," she repeated with a nod of encouragement to Miss Thorley who looked disgusted instead of pleased as Mary Rose had expected she would look.
"That isn't the kind of work I care for," and she shrugged her shoulders. "I should think your Mrs. Evans would die."
"She hasn't time to die," Mary Rose told her seriously. "She's too busy taking care of Mr. Evans and her family and helping other people. She's a fine woman, everyone said in Mifflin. When I grow up I want to be just like her," emphatically.
"Oh, Mary Rose! You want to be something besides a drudge. Women have other things to do now but cook and sew and look after crying babies."
"Babies don't cry unless there's a pin sticking into them or they have the colic, and, anyway, I think babies are the dearest things God ever made. I'd like to have twelve when I grow up, six boys and six girls. I don't ever want an only child. It's too lonesome. Don't you ever get lonesome, Miss Thorley?"
"I have my work," Miss Thorley told her briefly.