h,
or can get it; and if I have not put affairs in the right trim at the
end of a year I will stop, and you may make some other arrangement. If I
have, you and your mother and sister can pay me back."

"So I am going to be the wife, and you the husband," said Tom, a little
indignantly; "at least, that is what people will say. It's a regular
Darby and Joan affair, and you think you can do more work in a day than
I can do in three. Do you know that you must go to town to buy cotton?
And do you know there are a thousand things about it that you don't
know?"

"And never will?" said Mary, with perfect good humor. "Why, Tom, I can
learn as well as you, and a good deal better, for I like business, and
you don't. You forget that I was always father's right-hand man after I
was a dozen years old, and that you have let me invest my money and some
of your own, and I haven't made a blunder yet."

Tom thought that his wife had never looked so handsome or so happy. "I
don't care, I should rather like the fun of knowing what people will
say. It is a new departure, at any rate. Women think they can do
everything better than men in these days, but I'm the first man,
apparently, who has wished he were a woman."

"Of course people will laugh," said Mary, "but they will say that it's
just like me, and think I am fortunate to have married a man who will
let me do as I choose. I don't see why it isn't sensible: you will be
living exactly as you were before you married, as to home affairs; and
since it was a good thing for you to know something about housekeeping
then, I can't imagine why you shouldn't go on with it now, since it
makes me miserable, and I am wasting a fine business talent while I do
it. What do we care for people's talking about it?"

"It seems to me that it is something like women's smoking: it isn't
wicked, but it isn't the custom of the country. And I don't like the
idea of your going among business men. Of course I should be above going
with you, and having people think I must be an idiot; they would say
that you married a manufacturing interest, and I was thrown in. I can
foresee that my pride is going to be humbled to the dust in every way,"
Tom declared in mournful tones, and began to shake with laughter. "It is
one of your lovely castles in the air, dear Polly, but an old brick mill
needs a better foundation than the clouds. No, I'll look around, and get
an honest, experienced man for agent. I suppose it's the be