“Hire help!  Who would I get to do the work here?”

“You’d have to double your assistants.  You could not hire two women who would come here and do so much work as I do in a day.  That is why I decline to give up teaching, and stay here to slave at your option, for gingham dresses and cowhide shoes, of your selection.  If I were a boy, I’d work three years more and then I would be given two hundred acres of land, have a house and barn built for me, and a start of stock given me, as every boy in this family has had at twenty-one.”

“A man is a man!  He founds a family, he runs the Government!  It is a different matter,” said Mrs. Bates.

“It surely is; in this family.  But I think, even with us, a man would have rather a difficult proposition on his hands to found a family without a woman; or to run the Government either.”

“All right!  Go on to Adam and see what you get.”

“I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that Nancy Ellen gets dinner, anyway,” said Kate as she passed through the door and followed the long path to the gate, from there walking beside the road in the direction of her brother’s home.  There were many horses in the pasture and single and double buggies in the barn; but it never occurred to Kate that she might ride:  it was Sunday and the horses were resting.  So she followed the path beside the fences, rounded the corner of the church and went on her way with the text from which the pastor was preaching, hammering in her brain.  She became so absorbed in thought that she scarcely saw the footpath she followed, while June flowered, and perfumed, and sang all around her.

She was so intent upon the words she had heard that her feet unconsciously followed a well-defined branch from the main path leading into the woods, from the bridge, where she sat on a log, and for the unnumbered time, reviewed her problem.  She had worked ever since she could remember.  Never in her life had she gotten to school before noon on Monday, because of the large washings.  After the other work was finished she had spent nights and mornings ironing, when she longed to study, seldom finishing before Saturday.  Summer brought an endless round of harvesting, canning, drying; winter brought butchering, heaps of sewing, and postponed summer work.  School began late in the fall and closed early in spring, with teachers often inefficient; yet because she was a close student and kept her books where she could take a peep and memorize and think as she washed dishes and cooked, she had thoroughly mastered all the country school near her home could teach her.  With six weeks of a summer Normal course she would be as well prepared to teach as any of her sisters were, with the exception of Mary, who had been able to convince her parents that she possessed two college years’ worth of “ability.”