“I wish you could,” said Mrs. Holabird, benevolently.

“She needs doing with” said Barbara.

“Your having her would be different from our doing so,” said Mrs. Holabird.  “I often think that one of the tangles in the girl-question is the mistake of taking the rawest specimens into families that keep but one.  With your Lucy, it might be the very making of Winny to go to you.”

“The ‘next’ for her, as Ruth would say,” said Barbara.

“Yes.  The least little thing that comes next is better than a world full of wisdom away off beyond.  There is too much in ’general housework’ for one ignorant, inexperienced brain to take in.  What should we think of a government that gave out its ‘general field-work’ so?”

“There won’t be any Lucys long,” said Madam Pennington, with a sigh.  “What are homes coming to?”

“Back to homes, I hope, from houses divided against themselves into parlors and kitchens,” said mother, earnestly.  “If I should tell you all I think about it, you would say it was visionary, I am afraid.  But I believe we have got to go back to first principles; and then the Lucys will grow again.”

“Modern establishments are not homes truly,” said Madam Pennington.

“We shall call them by their names, as the French do, if we go on,” said mother,—­“hotels.”

“And how are we to stop, or help it?  The enemy has got possession.  Irishocracy is a despotism in the land.”

“Only,” said mother, in her sweetest, most heartfelt way, “by learning how true it is that one must be chief to really serve; that it takes the highest to do perfect ministering; that the brightest grace and the most beautiful culture must come to bear upon this little, every-day living, which is all that the world works for after all.  The whole heaven is made that just the daily bread for human souls may come down out of it.  Only the Lord God can pour this room full of little waves of sunshine, and make a still, sweet morning in the earth.”

Mother and Madam Pennington looked at each other with soulful eyes.

“‘We girls,’” began mother again, smiling,—­“for that is the way the children count me in,—­said to each other, when we first tried this new plan, that we would make an art-kitchen.  We meant we would have things nice and pretty for our common work; but there is something behind that,—­the something that ’makes the meanest task divine,’—­the spiritual correspondence of it.  When we are educated up to that I think life and society will be somewhat different.  I think we shall not always stop short at the drawing-room, and pretend at each other on the surface of things.  I think the time may come when young girls and single women will be as willing, and think it as honorable, to go into homes which they need, and which need them, and give the best that they have grown to into the commonwealth of them, as they are willing now to educate and try for public