there are limits to the duties of a minister's wife.

She rose early, like the rest of us; and as summer came on we used to
see her moving about in her little garden patch in the dewy, golden
morning. She wore absurd pale-blue kimonos that made her stout figure
loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The
neighbourhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as
they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said it
was disgusting--and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily
overcome. Blanche Devine--snipping her sweet peas; peering anxiously at
the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers to the
trellis; watering the flower baskets that hung from her porch--was
blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes. I wish one of us had
just stopped to call good morning to her over the fence, and to say in
our neighbourly, small town way: "My, ain't this a scorcher! So early
too! It'll be fierce by noon!" But we did not.

I think perhaps the evenings must have been the loneliest for her. The
summer evenings in our little town are filled with intimate, human,
neighbourly sounds. After the heat of the day it is infinitely pleasant
to relax in the cool comfort of the front porch, with the life of the
town eddying about us. We sew and read out there until it grows dusk. We
call across-lots to our next-door neighbour. The men water the lawns and
the flower boxes and get together in little quiet groups to discuss the
new street paving. I have even known Mrs. Hines to bring her cherries
out there when she had canning to do, and pit them there on the front
porch partially shielded by her porch vine, but not so effectually that
she was deprived of the sights and sounds about her. The kettle in her
lap and the dishpan full of great ripe cherries on the porch floor by
her chair, she would pit and chat and peer out through the vines, the
red juice staining her plump bare arms.

I have wondered since what Blanche Devine thought of us those lonesome
evenings--those evenings filled with little friendly sights and sounds.
It is lonely, uphill business at best--this being good. It must have
been difficult for her, who had dwelt behind closed shutters so long, to
seat herself on the new front porch for all the world to stare at; but
she did sit there--resolutely--watching us in silence.

She seized hungrily upon the stray crumbs of conversation that fell to
her. The