“
It’s all very well for our husbands and sons to be away fighting for their country—I’d horsewhip one of mine who sneaked at home; but for all that, this manless state of the town is a terrible test to the tidiness and the tempers of the womenfolk,” said Mistress Strudwick, as she sat on her porch with some chosen cronies, and watched the young girls of the town promenading in the aftermath of the July sunset with never a cavalier among them. “Look at Lucinda Hardy, she’s as cross as a patch; and yonder is Janet Cameron, who has not curled her hair for a week—just mops it up any way, since there are no men to see it.”
“And there’s ’Liza Jones without her stays,” said Mistress Clevering.
“Yes, and looking for all the world like a comfortable pillow that has just been shaken up; but if there was a man under threescore in seeing distance, she’d be as trim as you please,” replied Mistress Strudwick. “Heigh-ho, what a slipshod world this would be if there were nobody but women in it!”
“And what a topsy-turvy place ’twould be with only men. Nobody’d ever know where anything was,” said quiet Mistress Cheshire, with poignant recollections of striving to keep up with the belongings of two husbands. “Depend upon it, Martha Strudwick, the world would be a deal worse off without women than without men, for men never can find anything.”
“I am quite of your mind, Mary. In sooth, I always had a sneaking notion that Columbus brought his wife along when he came to discover America, and that ’twas she who first saw the land,” said Sally Ruffin.
“I don’t seem to remember that there was a Mistress Columbus,” said Ann Clevering, biting off her thread with a snap.
“Well, goodness knows there had ought to have been, for Columbus had a son,” replied Martha Strudwick, greatly scandalized, although her own knowledge in the matter was somewhat hazy.
“How ’pon earth did we ever get to talking such wise things as history?” asked Mistress Cheshire, whose forte was housewifely recipes.
“We were saying as how men never could find things.”