? We're all out of a place again." And she sat
down resignedly on a very low cricket, in the middle of the room.

"I'll tell you what we'll do, mother," said Ruth, coming round. "I've
thought of it this good while. We'll co-operate!"

"She's glad of it! She's been waiting for a chance! I believe she put
the luminary up to it! Ruth, you're a brick--moon!"

CHAPTER VI.

CO-OPERATING.

When mother first read that article in the Atlantic she had said,
right off,--

"I'm sure I wish they would!"

"Would what, mother?" asked Barbara.

"Co-operate."

"O mother! I really do believe you must belong, somehow, to the
Micawber family! I shouldn't wonder if one of these days, when they
come into their luck, you should hear of something greatly to your
advantage, from over the water. You have such faith in 'they'! I don't
believe '_they_' will ever do much for '_us_'!"

"What is it, dear?" asked Mrs. Hobart, rousing from a little arm-chair
wink, during which Mrs. Holabird had taken up the magazine.

Mrs. Hobart had come in, with her cable wool and her great ivory
knitting-pins, to sit an hour, sociably.

"Co-operative housekeeping, ma'am," said Barbara.

"Oh! Yes. That is what they _used_ to have, in old times, when we
lived at home with mother. Only they didn't write articles about it.
All the women in a house co-operated--to keep it; and all the
neighborhood co-operated--by living exactly in the same way.
Nowadays, it's co-operative shirking; isn't it?"

One never could quite tell whether Mrs. Hobart was more simple or
sharp.

That was all that was said about co-operative housekeeping at the
time. But Ruth remembered the conversation. So did Barbara, for a
while, as appeared in something she came out with a few days after.

"I could--almost--write a little poem!" she said, suddenly, over her
work. "Only that would be doing just what the rest do. Everything
turns into a poem, or an article, nowadays. I wish we'd lived in the
times when people _did_ the things!"

"O Barbara! _Think_ of all that is being done in the world!"

"I know. But the little private things. They want to turn everything
into a movement. Miss Trixie says they won't have any eggs from their
fowls next winter; all their chickens are roosters, and all they'll do
will be to sit in a row on the fence and crow! I think the world is
running pretty much to roosters."

"Is that the poem?"

"I don't know. It might come in. All I've got is