k from the deep window
seats, frothed it with Hester's herb-scented soap, and rinsed and
dipped and dried each dish and cup of her own using before the old
woman returned.

"It is surprising how--how _satisfactory_ it makes one feel, really,"
she began hastily at the housewife's friendly returning nod, "to deal
with this sort of work. One seems to have accomplished something
that--that had to be done... I don't know whether you see what I mean,
exactly...."

"Bless you, my dear, and why shouldn't I see?" cried the other,
scrubbing the coats of a lapful of brown jacketed potatoes at the
spigot. "Every woman knows that feeling, surely?"

"I never did," she said, simply. "I thought it was greasy, thankless
work, and felt very sorry for those who did it."

"Did they look sad?" asked the old worker.

In a flash of memory they passed before her, those white-aproned,
bare-elbowed girls she had watched idly in many countries and at many
seasons; from the nurse that bathed and combed her own children,
singing, to the laundry-maids whose laughter and ringing talk had waked
her from more than one uneasy afternoon sleep.

"Why, no, I can't say that they did," she answered slowly, "but to do
it steadily, I should think..."

"It's the steady work that puts the taste into the holiday, my mother
used to say," said the old woman shortly. "Where's the change, else?"

"But of course there are many different forms of work," she began,
slowly, as though she were once for all making the matter clear to
herself, and not at all explaining obvious distinctions to an
uneducated old woman, "and brain workers need rest and change as much,
yes, more, than mere labourers."

"So they tell me," said Hester's mother respectfully, "though of course
I know next to nothing of it myself. Ann says it's that makes it so
dangerous for women folks to worry at their brains too much, for she's
taken notice, she says, that mostly they're sickly or cranky that works
too much that way. Hard to get on with, she says they are, the best of
'em."

"Indeed!" she cried indignantly, "and I suppose to be 'easy to get on
with' is the main business of women, then!"

"Why, Lord above us, child!" answered the old woman briskly, dropping
her white potatoes into a brown dish of fresh-drawn water, "if the
women are not to be easy got on with, who's to be looked to for it,
then; the children--or the men?"

She gathered up the brown peelings and bagged them c