"Oh, it's in the air; every one says so. Dan says so."
"I've warned Morton to let Edward Thatcher alone. The United States Senate wouldn't be ornamented by having either one of them down there. I met Colonel Ramsay—guess he's got the senatorial bee in his hat, too—coming up on the train from Louisville the other day. There's only one qualification I can think of that the Colonel has for going to the Senate—he would wring tears out of the galleries when he made obituary speeches about the dead members. When my brother Blackford was senator, it seemed to me he spent most of his time acting as pallbearer for the dead ones. But what were we talking about, Sylvia? Oh, yes. I'm going to send those catalogues over to your room, and as you get time I want you to study out a scheme for a little school to teach what you call efficiency to girls that have to earn their living. I don't mean school-teaching, but a whole lot of things women ought to be doing but ain't because they don't know how. Do you get the idea?"
"A school?" asked Sylvia wonderingly.
"A kind of school."
"It's a splendid, a beautiful idea, but you need better advice than I can give you. They talk a good deal now about vocational training, and it's going to mean a great deal to women."
"Well, we must get hold of all the latest ideas, and if there's any good in us old daguerreotypes, we'll keep it, and graft it on to the kodak."
"Oh, I hope there will always be ladies of the daguerreotype! One thing we women have to pray to be saved from is intolerance toward our sisters. You know," continued Sylvia with a dropping of her voice and a tilting of her head that caused Mrs. Owen to laugh,—"you know we are not awfully tolerant. And there's a breadth of view, an ability to brush away trifles and get to the heart of things, that we're just growing up to. And magnanimity—I think we fall short there. I'm just now trying to cultivate a sisterly feeling toward these good women for whom Jane Austen and Sir Roger de Coverley and the knitting of pale-blue tea cosies are all of life—who like mild twilight with the children singing hymns at the piano and the husband coming home to find his slippers set up against the baseburner. That was beautiful, but even they owe something to the million or so women to whom Jane Addams is far more important than Jane Austen. It might be more comfortable if the world never moved, but unfortunately it does seem to turn over occasionally."
"I notice that you can say things like that, Sylvia, without waving your hands, or shouting like an old woman with a shawl on her head swinging a broom at the boys in her cherry tree. We've got to learn to do that. It was some time after I went into business, when Jackson Owen died, before I learned that you couldn't shoo men the way you shoo hens. You got to drop a little corn in a fence corner and then throw your apron over 'em. It strikes me that if you could catch these girls that go to work in stores and offices young enough you might put them in the way of doing something better. There are schools doing this kind of thing, but I'd like to plant one right here in Indiana for the kind of girls we've got at Elizabeth House. They haven't much ambition, most of 'em; they're stuck right where they are. I'd like to see what can be done toward changing that, and see it started in my lifetime. And we must do it right. Think it over as you get time." She glanced at the window. "You'd better stay all night, Sylvia; it's getting dark."
"No, I must run along home. The girls expect me."
"That school idea's just between you and me for the present," Mrs. Owen remarked as she watched Sylvia button her mackintosh. "Look here, Sylvia, don't you need some money? I mean, of course, don't you want to borrow some?"