“Just about my own.”
He gave her the smallest suit in stock, and she held it up against her. It was much too brief, and she was heartened to know that there were workmen littler than she.
She bought the garment that came nearest to her own dimensions, and hurried home with it joyously. It proved to be a perfect misfit, and she worked over it as if it were a coming-out gown; and indeed it was her costume for her début into the world of manual labor.
Abbie dropped in and surprised her in her attitudes and was handsomely scandalized:
“When’s the masquerade?” she asked.
Mamise told her of her new career.
Abbie was appalled. “It’s against the Bible for a woman to wear a man’s things!” she protested. Abbie could quote the Scripture for every discouraging purpose.
“I’d rather wear them than wash them,” said Mamise; “and if you’ll take my advice you’ll get a suit of overalls yourself and earn an honest living and five times as much money as Jake would give you––if he ever gave you any.”
But Abbie wailed that Mamise had gone indecent as well as crazy, and trembled at the thought of what the gossips along the row would do with the family reputation. The worst of it was that Mamise had money in the bank and did not have to work.
That was the incomprehensible thing to Jake Nuddle. He accepted the familiar theory that all capital is stolen goods, and he reproached Mamise with the double theft of poor folks’ money and now of poor folks’ work. Mamise’s contention that there were not enough workmen for the country’s needs fell on deaf ears, for Jake believed that work was a crime against the sacred cause of the laboring-man. His ideal of a laboring-man was one who seized the capital from the capitalists and then ceased to labor.