"The thing I like about our life down here," she said to me one night, "is the chance it gives me to get something of myself into every single detail of the home."
I didn't know what she meant because it seemed to me that was just what she had always done. But she shook her head when I said so.
"No," she said. "Not the way I can now."
"Well, you didn't have a servant and must have done whatever was done," I said.
"I didn't have time to pick out the food for the table," she said. "I had to order it of the grocery man. I didn't have time to make as many of your clothes as I wanted. Why I didn't even have time to plan."
"If anyone had told me that a woman could do any more than you then were doing, I should have laughed at them," I said.
"You and the boy weren't all my own then," she said. "I had to waste a great deal of time on things outside the house. Sometimes it used to make me feel as though you were just one of the neighbors, Billy."
I began to see what she meant. But she certainly found now just as much time if not more to spare on the women and babies all around us.
"They aren't neighbors," she said. "They are friends."
I suppose she felt like that because what she did for them wasn't just wasted energy like an evening at cards.