“Study, and write—she writes the dearest little stories,—or anything else, if she cannot do that. She has ideas,” said Jean, gravely; “she is a rusher into new things. I wish she would be married and have a nice little home and care how the bread rises and the pudding comes out of the oven.”
“Isn’t she interested in housekeeping?”
“Oh, yes. But it is Miss Marion’s. Not her own. It is the own that makes the difference,” replied the girl-wife contentedly, nodding and smiling out the window to the man in shirt-sleeves and leather apron who stood in the doorway of the shop talking to the minister on horseback.
How could she ever tell Judith that Bensalem was gossiping about her staying at the parsonage?
“Your work is your own; it comes to be your own, whatever it is. Every girl cannot marry a blacksmith, Jean, and have a small home of her own.”
“I know it. I wish they could. What I wish most for Judith is for her to go back to Aunt Affy’s.”
That afternoon as the three sat together in the blacksmith’s parlor, Jean with towels she was hemming for her mother, and the other two with idle hands and work upon their laps, Jean suddenly asked Mrs. Lane to tell them about women and their doings.
“As I waited in the station for my train the day I came here,” began Mrs. Lane in the conversational tone of one prepared for a long talk, “a lady sat near me, also waiting, with a bag in her hand. I had a bag in my hand, but there was nothing unusual in mine; she told me she was going to Dunellen to take care of ladies’ finger-nails. She had a good business in Dunellen and the suburbs in summer, when the people were in their country homes; there were a few ladies who expected her that day.”
“I wouldn’t like to do that,” declared Jean, “although I would do almost anything to pay off our mortgage.”
“In Buffalo is a woman who runs a street-cleaning bureau; in Kansas City a woman is at the head of a fire department.”