“You cannot do your own work, with children,” said Mrs. Brown firmly.

“Of course you can’t.  But why is it that our nice young American girls won’t come into our homes?  Why do we have to depend upon the most ignorant and untrained of our foreign people?  Our girls pour into the factories, although our husbands don’t have any trouble in getting their brothers for office positions.  There is always a line of boys waiting for a possible job at five dollars a week.”

“Because they can sleep at home,” submitted the doctor.

“You know that, other things being equal, young people would much rather not sleep at home,” said Mrs. Burgoyne, “it’s the migrating age.  They love the novelty of being away at night.”

“Well, when a boy comes into my office,” the doctor reasoned slowly, “he knows that he has certain unimportant things to do, but he sees me taking all the real responsibility, he knows that I work harder than he does.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Burgoyne.  “Men do their own work, with help.  We don’t do ours.  Not only that, but every improvement that comes to ours comes from men.  They invent our conveniences, they design our stoves and arrange our sinks.  Not because they know anything about it, but because we’re not interested.”

“One would think you had done your own work for twenty years!” said Mrs. Brown.

“I never did it,” Mrs. Burgoyne answered smiling, “but I sometimes wish I could.  I sometimes envy those busy women who have small houses, new babies, money cares—­it must be glorious to rise to fresh emergencies every hour of your life.  A person like myself is handicapped.  I can’t demonstrate that I believe what I say.  Everyone thinks me merely a little affected about it.  If I were such a woman, I’d glory in clipping my life of everything but the things I needed, and living like one of my own children, as simply as a lot of peasants!”

“And no one would ever be any the wiser,” said Mrs. Brown.

“I don’t know.  Quiet little isolated lives have a funny way of getting out into the light.  There was that little peasant girl at Domremy, for instance; there was that gentle saint who preached poverty to the birds; there was Eugenie Guerin, and the Cure of Ars, and the few obscure little English weavers—­and there was the President who split—­”

“I thought we’d come to him!” chuckled the doctor.

“Well,” Mrs. Burgoyne smiled, a little confused at having betrayed hero-worship.  “Well, and there was one more, the greatest of all, who didn’t found any asylums, or lead any crusade—­” She paused.

“Surely,” said the doctor, quietly.  “Surely.  I suppose that curing the lame here, and the blind there, and giving the people their fill of wine one day, and of bread and fishes the next, might be called ‘dabbling’ in these days.  But the love that went with those things is warming the world yet!”

“Well, but what can we do?” demanded Mrs. Brown after a short silence.