ing?" he inquired.

Clarissa dropped her iron and confronted him dramatically.

"Doubtless--if I could afford to pay her," she responded. "As you are
already aware, the salary of associate professors in the Midwest
University is fourteen hundred dollars a year. When steak was a
shilling a pound {132} and eggs fifteen cents a dozen and the
washerwoman asked a dollar a day, one could afford to have her help
longer. Now it is different."

Professor Charleroy moved quietly over to the ironing-board and put
the flatiron, which was still hot enough to scorch, upon its stand.
Then he arranged, in a glass, the handful of daffodils he was
carrying, and set them where the April sunshine fell across them.

"Yes, I know it is different," he said gloomily. "But it may be
different again if I can place my text-book. When we married,
Clarissa, I thought your own little income would be sufficient to
protect you from such economies as I knew would be most distasteful to
you--but, somehow, it--it does n't seem to do it."

"It goes," returned Clarissa. "I don't {133} know how it goes, but it
does. I dare say I'm not a good manager. It is n't as if I dressed
well, for I don't. But I would n't mind, if we could go to Chicago for
a week of music and theatres in the spring. But we can't do anything
but live--and _that_ is n't living! Something is wrong with the whole
system of woman's work in the world. I don't know what it is, but I
mean to find out. Somebody has got to do something about it."

She threw back her small blonde head as she spoke, and it was as if
she gave the universe and all its powers warning that she did not
purpose to live indefinitely under such an ill-arranged order of
things as they were maintaining. Let the universe look to itself!

"I met Baumgarten of the Midwest Ice Company on the campus. He says
{134} if this weather holds, he will start his ice-wagons to-morrow,"
suggested her husband anxiously. He had very definite reasons for
wishing to divert Clarissa from consideration of all the things that
are out of joint in the world.

"Ice is a detail. Sometimes details do help," admitted Clarissa,
fanning her blazing cheeks.

"We will have Jacob come and wash the windows and put on the screens
in the morning," he continued very gently. "And I will uncover the
roses and rake the beds this afternoon. I should have done it last
week, but no one could forsee this weather."

"I'm not ready for Jacob until I have b