“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 the end of it.  It came into my head hind side before.  If it could only have a beginning and a middle put to it, it might do.  It’s just the wind-up, where they have to give an account, you know, and what they’ll have to show for it, and the thing that really amounts, after all.”

“Well, tell us.”

“It’s only five lines, and one rhyme.  But it might be written up to.  They could say all sorts of things,—­one and another:—­

        “I wrote some little books;
          I said some little says;
        I preached a little preach;
          I lit a little blaze;
      I made things pleasant in one little place.”

There was a shout at Barbara’s “poem.”

“I thought I might as well relieve my mind,” she said, meekly.  “I knew it was all there would ever be of it.”

But Barbara’s rhyme stayed in our heads, and got quoted in the family.  She illustrated on a small scale what the “poems and articles” may sometimes do in the great world,

We remembered it that day when Ruth said, “Let’s co-operate.”

We talked it over,—­what we could do without a girl.  We had talked it over before.  We had had to try it, more or less, during interregnums.  But in our little house in Z——­, with the dark kitchen, and with Barbara and Ruth going to school, and the washing-days, when we had to hire, it always cost more than it came to, besides making what Barb called a “heave-offering of life.”

“They used to have houses built accordingly,” Rosamond said, speaking of the “old times.”  “Grandmother’s kitchen was the biggest and pleasantest room in the house.”

“Couldn’t we make the kitchen the pleasantest room?” suggested Ruth.  “Wouldn’t it be sure to be, if it was the room we all stayed in mornings, and where we had our morning work?  Whatever room we do that in always is, you know.  The look grows.  Kitchens are horrid when girls have just gone out of them, and left the dish-towels dirty, and the dish-cloth all wabbled up in the sink, and all the tins and irons wanting to be cleaned.  But if we once got up a real ladies’ kitchen of our own!  I can think how it might be lovely!”