“But I thought the modern theory was against dabbling,” said Mrs. Brown, a little timidly, for she held a theory that she was not “smart.”  “I thought everything was being done by institutions, and by laws—­by legislation.”

“Nothing will ever be done by legislation, to my thinking at least,” Mrs. Burgoyne said.  “A few years ago we legislated some thousands of new babies into magnificent institutions.  Nurses mixed their bottles, doctors inspected them, nurses turned them and washed them and watched them.  Do you know what percentage survived?”

“Doesn’t work very well,” said the doctor, shaking a thoughtful head over his pipe.

“Just one hundred per cent didn’t survive!” said Mrs. Burgoyne.  “Now they take a foundling or an otherwise unfortunate baby, and give it to a real live mother.  She nurses it if she can, she keeps near to it and cuddles it, and loves it.  And so it lives.  In all the asylums, it’s the same way.  Groups are getting smaller and smaller, a dozen girls with a matron in a cottage, and hundreds of girls ‘farmed out’ with good, responsible women, instead of enormous refectories and dormitories and schoolrooms.  And the ideal solution will be when every individual woman in the world extends her mothering to include every young thing she comes in contact with; one doll for her own child and another doll for the ashman’s little girl, one dimity for her own debutante, and another just as dainty for the seventeen-year-old who brings home the laundry every week.”

“Yes, but that’s puttering here and there,” asserted Mrs. Brown, “wouldn’t laws for a working wage do all that, and more, too?”

“In the first place, a working wage doesn’t solve it,” Mrs. Burgoyne answered vigorously, “because in fully half the mismanaged and dirty homes, the working people have a working wage, have an amount of money that would amaze you!  Who buys the willow plumes, and the phonographs, and the enlarged pictures, and the hair combs and the white shoes that are sold by the million every year?  The poor people, girls in shops, and women whose babies are always dirty, and always broken out with skin trouble, and whose homes are hot and dirty and miserable and mismanaged.”

“Well, make some laws to educate ’em then, if it’s education they all need,” suggested the doctor, who had been auditing every clause of the last remark with a thoughtful nod.

“No, wages aren’t the question,” Mrs. Burgoyne reiterated.  “Why, I knew a little Swedish woman once, who raised three children on three hundred dollars a year.”

“She couldn’t!” ejaculated Mrs. Brown.

“Oh, but she did!  She paid one dollar a week for rent, too.  One son is a civil engineer, now, and the daughter is a nurse.  The youngest is studying medicine.”

“But what did they eat, do you suppose?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  Potatoes, I suppose, and oatmeal and baked cabbage, and soup.  I know she got a quart of buttermilk every day, for three cents.  They were beautiful children.  They went to free schools, and lectures, and galleries, and park concerts, and free dispensaries, when they needed them.  Laws could do no more for her, she knew her business.”