“Mediaeval?  Say that some other way, Sylvia.”

“I mean that we’re still crippled—­we women—­by the long years in which nothing was expected of us but to sit in ivy-mantled casements and work embroidery while our lords went out to fight, or thrummed the lute under our windows.”

“Well, there was Joan of Arc:  she delivered the goods.”

“To be sure; she does rather light up her time, doesn’t she?” laughed Sylvia.

“Sylvia, the day I first saw a woman hammer a typewriter in a man’s office, I thought the end had come.  It seemed, as the saying is, ’agin nater’; and I reckon it was.  Nowadays these buildings downtown are full of women.  At noontime Washington Street is crowded with girls who work in offices and shops.  They don’t get much pay for it either.  Most of those girls would a lot rather work in an office or stand behind a counter than stay at home and help their mothers bake and scrub and wash and iron.  These same girls used to do just that,—­help their mothers,—­coming downtown about once a month, or when there was a circus procession, and having for company some young engine-wiper who took them to church or to a Thanksgiving matinee and who probably married them some day.  A girl who didn’t marry took in sewing for the neighbors, and as like as not went to live with her married sister and looked after her babies.  I’ve seen all these things change.  Nowadays girls have got to have excitement.  They like spending their days in the big buildings; the men in the offices jolly them, the men bookkeepers and clerks seem a lot nicer than the mechanics that live out in their neighborhood.  When they ain’t busy they loaf in the halls of the buildings flirting, or reading novels and talking to their bosses’ callers.  They don’t have to soil their hands, and you can dress a girl up in a skirt and shirt-waist so she looks pretty decent for about two weeks of her wages.  They don’t care much about getting married unless they can strike some fellow with an automobile who can buy them better clothes than they can buy themselves.  What they hanker for is a flat or boarding-house where they won’t have any housekeeping to do.  Housekeeping!  Their notions of housekeeping don’t go beyond boiling an egg on a gas range and opening up a sofa to sleep on.  You’re an educated woman, Sylvia; what’s going to come of all this?”

“It isn’t just the fault of the girls that they do this, is it?  Near my school-house there are girls who stay at home with their mothers, and many of them are without any ambition of any kind.  I’m a good deal for the girl who wants to strike out for herself.  The household arts as you knew them in your youth can’t be practised in the home any more on the income of the average man.  Most women of the kind we’re talking about wear ready-made clothes—­not because they’re lazy, but because the tailor-made suits which life in a city demands can’t be made by any amateur sempstress.  They’re turned out by the carload