added, with dignity, "an' for my part, I ain't got any use for those
women who are everlastingly standin' up for thar rights. What does a
woman want with rights, I say, when she can enjoy all the virtues? What
does she want to be standin' up for anyway as long as she can set?"

"Thar's no doubt that it is true, mum," rejoined my father; and when he
took his leave a few minutes afterwards, their relations appeared to
have become extremely friendly,--not to say confidential. For an instant
I trembled in my hiding-place, half expecting to be delivered into his
hands. But he departed at last without discovering me, and I emerged
from the darkness and stood before Mrs. Chitling, who had begun
absent-mindedly to take down her curl papers.

"Most likely it ain't his fault arter all," she observed, for her
judgment of him had already become a part of the general softness and
pliability of her criticism of life; "he seems to be a nice sensible
body with proper ideas about women. I like a man that knows a woman's
place, an' I like a woman that knows it, too. Yo' ma was a decent,
sober, hard-workin' person, wa'nt she, Benjy?"

I replied that she was always in her kitchen and generally in her
washtub, except when she went to funerals.

"Well, I ain't any moral objection to a funeral now an' then, or some
other sober kind of entertainment," returned Mrs. Chitling, removing her
curl papers in order to put on fresh ones, "but what I say is that the
woman who wants pleasure outside her do' ain't the woman that she ought
to be, that's all. What can she have, I ax, any mo' than she's got?
Ain't she got everything already that the men don't want? Ain't
sweetness an' virtue, an' patience an' long suffering an' childbearin'
enough for her without her impudently standin' up in the face of men an'
axin' for mo'? Had she rather have a vote than the respect of men, an'
ain't the respect of men enough to fill any honest female's life?"

In the beginning of her discourse, she had turned aside to slap a
portion of cornmeal into a cracked yellow bowl, and after pouring a
little water out of a broken dipper, she began whipping the dough with a
long, irregular stroke that scattered a shower of fine drops at every
revolution of her hand. Two of the children had got into a fight over a
basin of apple parings, and she left her yellow bowl and separated them
with a hand that bestowed a patch of wet meal on the hair of one and on
the face of another.