"It's only that Mr. Crabtree brought word from town that the big grocery he sells my butter to would agree to take any amount I could
send them at a still larger price. If we could hold on to the place, buy more cows and all the milk other people in Sweetbriar have to sell I believe I could make the interest and more than the interest every year. But if Mr. Newsome needs the money, I am afraid—he might not like to wait. It would be a year before I could see exactly how things succeed—and that's a long time."
"Yes, and it would mean for you to just be a-turning yourself into meat and drink for the family, nothing more or less, Rose Mary. You work like you was a single filly hitched to a two-horse wagon now, and that would be just piling fence rails on top of the load of hay you are already a-drawing for all of us old live stock. You couldn't work all that butter."
"Don't you know that love mixed in the bread of life makes it easy for the woman to work a large batch for her family, Uncle Tucker?—and why not butter? Will you talk to Mr. Newsome the next time he comes and
see what he thinks of the plan? I would tell him about it myself—only I—I don't know why, but I don't—want to." Rose Mary blushed and looked away across the Road, but her confusion was all unnoticed by Uncle Tucker, who was busily lighting a second pipeful of tobacco.
"Yes, I'll talk to him and Crabtree both about it," he answered slowly. "I can't hardly bear the idea of your doing it, child, and if it was just me I wouldn't hear tell of it, but Sister Viney and Sister Amandy—moved they'd be like a couple of sprouts of their own honeysuckle vine that you had pulled up and left in the sun to wilt. Home was a place to grow in for women of their day, not just a-kinder waiting shack between stations like it has come to be in these times of women's uprising—in the newspapers."
"We don't get much new woman excitement out here in Harpeth Valley, Uncle Tucker," laughed Rose Mary, glad to see him rise once
more from the depth of his depression to his usual philosophic level. "You wouldn't call—er—er Mrs. Poteet a modern woman, would you?"
"Fly-away, Peggy Poteet is the genuine, original mossback and had oughter be expelled from the sex by the confederation president herself," answered Uncle Tucker as they both glanced down past the milk-house where they saw the comely mother of the seven at her gate administering refreshment in the form of bread and jam to all of her own and quite a number of the other members of the Swarm, including the General and the reclothed and shriven Tobe. "If there is another Poteet output next April we'll have to report her," he added with a laugh.
"But there never was a baby since Stonie like little Tucker," answered Rose Mary in quick defense of the small namesake of whom Uncle Tucker was secretly but inordinately proud.