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.

But she went back again and again, as though it were a song, to this
notion that our new home was all her own.

"You may think me a pig, Billy," she said. "But I like it. I like to
pick out all myself, every single potato you and the boy eat; I like
to pick out every leaf of lettuce, every apple. It makes me feel as
though I was doing something for you."

"Good land--" I said.

But she wouldn't let me finish.

"No, Billy," she said. "You don't understand what all that means to
me--how it makes me a part of you and Dick as I never was before. And
I like to think that in everything you wear there's a stitch of mine
right close to you. And that when you and the boy lie down at night
I'm touching you because I made everything clean for you with my own
hands."

It makes my throat grow lumpy even now when I remember the eager,
half-ashamed way she looked up into my eyes as she said this. Lord,
sometimes she made me feel like a little child and other times she
made me feel like a giant. But whichever way she made me feel at the
moment, she always left me wishing that I had in me every good thing a
man can have so that I might be half way worthy of her. There are
times when a fellow knows that as a man he doesn't count for much as
compared with any woman. And with such a woman as Ruth--well, God
knows I tried to do my best in those days and have tried to do that
ever since, but it makes me ache to think how little I've been able to
give her of all she deserves.

In her housework Ruth had developed a system that would have made a
fortune for any man if applied in the same degree to his business. I
learned a lot from her. Instead of going at her tasks in the haphazard
fashion of most women or doing things just because her grandmother
and her mother did them a certain way, she used her head. I've already
told how she did her washing little by little every day instead of
waiting for Monday and then tearing herself all to pieces, and that's
a fair example of her method. When she was cooking breakfast and had a
good fire, she'd have half her dinner on at the same time. Anything
th