"Riddy took this real nettlish.
"'I mean,' s'he, clear but brutal, 'you got to cut your stuff somewheres to the tune of a couple o' columns.'
"Well, it's hard to pick out which colour you'll take when you have a new dress only once in every so seldom; or which of your hens you'll kill when you know your chickens like you know your own mind; but these are nothing to the time we had deciding on what to omit out of the paper that night. And the decision hurt us even more than the deciding, for what we left out was Mis' Sturgis's two women's columns.
"'We can't leave out meat nor milk nor cleanliness nor the library,' says Mis' Toplady, reasonable, 'because them are the things we live by. An' so with the other write-ups we got planned. But receipts and patterns an' moth balls is only kind o' decorations, seems though. Besides, we all know about 'em, an' it's time we stopped talkin' about 'em, anyway.'
"Mis' Sturgis she cried a little on the corner of her shawl.
"'The receipts an' patterns an' moth balls is so w-womanly,' she says.
"Mis' Toplady whirled round at her.
"'If you know anything more womanly than conquerin' dirt an' disease an' the-dead-that-needn't-die,' s'she, 'I'll roll up my sleeves an' be into it. But it won't be eyelet embroidery nor yet boiled frostin'!'
"After that they wrote in hasty peace, though four o'clock come racing across the day like a runaway horse, and us not out of its way. And a few minutes past, when Riddy was waiting in the door for Mis' Sykes's last page, somebody most knocked him over, and there come Mis' Holcomb, our circulation editor, purple and white, like a ghost.
"'Lock the door—lock it!' she says. 'I've bolted the one to the foot of the stairs. Lock both outside ones an' lay yourselves low!' s'she.