"'He'll die,' said a guest.
"'I call it a worthy enterprise whatever the expense,' I said. 'It will set a fashion here an' a very good one. In this community there are so many dear ladies who are prisoners of gravitation. They rely almost exclusively on hired hands an' feet, an' are losin' the use o' their own. What confusion will spread among them when they learn that Mrs. William Henry Warburton, the richest woman in Fairfield County, and the daughter of a bishop, has been doin' her own work! What consternation! What dismay! What female profanity! What a revision of habits an' resolutions! Why, there's been nothin' like it since the descent of Lizzie.'
"'I think it's terrible,' said a fat lady from Louisville, distinguished for her appetite, an' often surreptitiously referred to as 'The Mammoth Cave of Kentucky.' 'The idea of trying to make it fashionable to endure drudgery! I think we women have all we can do now.'
"'To be respectable,' said Mrs. Bill; 'but let's try to do something else.'
"'Why don't you form a Ladies' Protective Union,' Bill suggested, 'an' choose the tiara for a symbol, an' strike for no hours a day an' all your husbands can earn?'
"'And the employment of skilled idlers only,' Mrs. Bill put in. 'They must all know how to do nothing in the modern way—by discussing the rights of women and the novel of lust, and the divorces past and prospective, by playing at bridge and benevolence. How absurd it all is! I'm not going to be an overgrown child any longer.'
"I saw that Mrs. Bill was makin' progress, an' with her assistance
I began to hope for better things in that neighborhood.
"You've got to reach the women somehow, you see, before you can improve the social conditions of a community. I love them, but many are overgrown children, as Mrs. Bill had put it, an' doin' nothing with singular skill an' determination an' often with appalling energy.
"Our pretty hostess had been helping a butler, as this talk went on, an' presently one of the other ladies joined her, an' never was any company so picturesquely an' amusingly served.
"'I've quite fallen in love with that three-year-old boy,' said Mrs. Bill, as we rose from the table. 'I had a good romp with him to-day.'