I confess that, although I agreed with Mrs. Makely in regard to what the workmen had better do, her position had been arrived at by such extraordinary reasoning that I blushed for her; at the same time, I wanted to laugh. She continued, triumphantly: “You see, the employers have ever so much more at stake.”
“Then men have everything at stake—the work of their hands,” said the young fellow.
“Oh, but surely,” said Mrs. Makely, “you wouldn’t set that against capital? You wouldn’t compare the two?”
“Yes, I should,” said Camp, and I could see his eye kindle and his jaw stiffen.
“Then I suppose you would say that a man ought to get as much for his work as an employer gets for his capital. If you think one has as much at stake as the other, you must think they ought to be paid alike.”
“That is just what I think,” said Camp, and Mrs. Makely burst into a peal of amiable laughter.
“Now, that is too preposterous!”
“Why is it preposterous?” he demanded, with a quivering nostril.
“Why, simply because it is” said the lady, but she did not say why, and although I thought so, too, I was glad she did not attempt to do it, for her conclusions seemed to me much better than her reasons.
The old wooden clock in the kitchen began to strike, and she rose briskly to her feet and went and laid the books she had been holding in her lap on the table beside Mrs. Camp’s bed. “We must really be going,” she said, as she leaned over and kissed the invalid. “It is your dinner-time, and we shall barely get back for lunch if we go by the Loop road; and I want very much to have Mr. Homos see the Witch’s Falls on the way. I have got two or three of the books here that Mr. Makely brought me last night—I sha’n’t have time to read them at once—and I’m smuggling in one of Mr. Twelvemough’s, that he’s too modest to present for himself.” She turned a gay glance upon me, and Mrs. Camp thanked me, and a number of civilities followed from all sides. In the process of their exchange, Mrs. Makely’s spirits perceptibly rose, and she came away in high good-humor with the whole Camp family. “Well, now, I am sure,” she said to the Altrurian, as we began the long ascent of the Loop road, “you must allow that you have seen some very original characters. But how warped people get living alone so much! That is the great drawback of the country. Mrs. Camp thinks the savings-bank did her a real injury in taking a mortgage on her place, and Reuben seems to have seen just enough of the outside world to get it all wrong. But they are the best-hearted creatures in the world, and I know you won’t misunderstand them. That unsparing country bluntness—don’t you think it’s perfectly delightful? I do like to stir poor Reuben up, and get him talking. He is a good boy, if he is so wrong-headed, and he’s the most devoted son and brother in the world. Very few young fellows would waste their lives on an old farm like that; I suppose, when his mother dies, he will marry and strike out for himself in some growing place.”