Mrs. Owen smiled as though recalling an agreeable experience.  “As long as there are old stumps in a field that you must plough around I haven’t got much use for the land.  When the corn comes up you don’t see the stumps, just sitting on the fence and looking over the scenery; but when you go to put the plow through again, your same old stumps loom up again, solider than ever.  I guess Daniel will come out all right; he was raised on a farm and ought to know how to drive a straight furrow.  By the way, they telephoned me from Elizabeth House last night that there’s a vacant room there.  Who’s moved out?”

Mrs. Owen always prolonged the E of Elizabeth, and never referred to the House except by its full title.

“Rose Farrell has left.  Went unexpectedly, I think.  I didn’t know she was going.”

“Let me see.  She’s that girl that worked for Morton and Daniel.  What’s she leaving for?”

“I’m going to see if I can’t get her back,” replied Sylvia evasively.

“Why Rose has been at Elizabeth House for two years and under the rules she can stay a year longer.  She ain’t getting married, is she?”

“I think not,” replied Sylvia.  “I’m going to look her up and get her back if possible.”

“You do that, Sylvia.  It ain’t just your place, but I’ll be glad if you’ll see what’s the matter.  We don’t want to lose a girl if we can help it.”

Mrs. Owen rose and transferred a pile of paperbound books from a shelf to her desk.  Sylvia recognized these as college catalogues and noted bits of paper thrust into the leaves as markers.

“I’ve been looking into this business some since we went down to college.  I had a lot of these schools send me their catalogues and they’re mighty interesting, though a good deal of it I don’t understand.  Sylvia” (Sylvia never heard her name drawled as Mrs. Owen spoke it without a thrill of expectancy)—­“Sylvia, there’s a lot of books being written, and pieces in the magazines all the time, about women and what we have done or can’t do.  What do you suppose it’s all leading up to?”

“That question is bigger than I am, Aunt Sally.  But I think the conditions that have thrown women out into the world as wage-earners are forcing one thing—­just one thing, that is more important now than any other—­it’s all summed up in the word efficiency.”

“Efficiency?”

Mrs. Owen reached for the poker and readjusted the logs; she watched the resulting sparks for a moment, then settled herself back in her chair and repeated Sylvia’s word again.

“You mean that a woman has got to learn how to make her jelly jell?  Is that your notion?”

“Exactly that.  She must learn not to waste her strokes.  Any scheme of education for woman that leaves that out works an injury.  If women are to be a permanent part of the army of wage-earning Americans they must learn to get full value from their minds or hands—­either one, it’s the same.  The trouble with us women is that there’s a lot of the old mediaeval taint in us.”