“She would be, at anything!” breathed Mattie devoutly.
“She surely would,” agreed her husband heartily. “Well, here at the house we’ve shuffled things around into a new pattern, and we’re getting on. I can do anything that needs to be done on this floor with Henry and Helen’s help, and the doctor says I’ll soon be on crutches and able to get upstairs once a day. It seemed queer to be doing housework, but there isn’t another mortal thing I can do but to keep things running. So I do.”
“Poor Lester!” said Mattie, just as he knew she would.
“Not on your life!” he told her. “I don’t mind the work a bit, now I’ve got used to the idea. I can’t say it is exactly enlivening to be tied up to half your body that’s dead but not buried, but I haven’t got anything else to complain of. As to the housework, I haven’t had such a good time in years. You know what an absentminded scut I am, with my head always full of odds and ends of book-junk I like to mull over. Well, housework doesn’t interfere with thinking as account-keeping does, believe me! I can start my hands and arms to washing dishes or peeling potatoes or setting the table, and then leave them to do the job while I roam from China to Peru. Every time I tried that at the office—the bottom dropped out. Here I’ve more time for thinking and for reading too in the evenings! The children bring the books to me from the Library.”
“Well, it’s very brave of you to take it that way, I’m sure,” said Mattie with a decent sigh of sympathy.
He thought to himself with exasperation that Mattie’s mental indolence was invincible. She never made the slightest effort of her own accord to escape from the rubber-stamp formula in which she had been brought up. By lively joshing you could occasionally jolt her into a spontaneous perception of her own, but the minute you stopped, back she sank and pulled the cover of the Ladies’ Guild mummy-case over her. And she was so human under it—one of the most human people he had ever met. As he was thinking all this, by no means for the first time in his life, she caught out of the corner of her eye a glimpse of something in the kitchen over which she now exclaimed in amazement “What in the name of time is all that litter of papers on the kitchen floor?”
“All that litter?” he protested. “That’s not litter, that is an original exercise of the human intelligence in contact with real life. You encounter so few of those you don’t recognize one when you meet it. That is one of the patented inventions of the Knapp Family, Incorporated.”
She looked at him dumbly with the patient expression of bewilderment which always brought him to time. He began to explain, literally and explicitly, “We have executive sessions, the children and I, to figure out ways and means to cope with life and not get beaten by small details. We all got together on this floor proposition. We put it to ourselves this way: the kitchen floor has to be scrubbed to keep it clean. None of us are smart enough to scrub it. What’s the answer? Of course Eva must simply do nothing whatever about the house. The doctor issued an ultimatum about that. She has all she can do at the store. Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but Stephen got the answer. He said, ‘When I paint with my watercolors, Mother always ’preads papers down on the floor.’
“Done! The attic was piled to the eaves with old newspapers. Every day Helen or Henry brings down a fresh supply. We spread them around two or three thick, drop our grease on them with all the peace of mind in the world, whisk them up at night before Eva comes in, and have a spotless floor to show her. What’s the matter with that?”
“Why, I never heard of such a thing in my life!” cried Mattie.
“People seemed to think,” reflected Lester, “that they make an all-sufficient comment when they say that.”
She got up now and walked to the kitchen door to gaze down on the paper.
“That’s a sample of the way we do business,” said Lester to her back. He wheeled himself over to the table and took out of a workbasket a pair of Stephen’s little stockings which he prepared to darn.
Mattie turned, saw what he was doing and pounced on him with shocked, peremptory benevolence. “Oh, Lester, let me do that! The idea of your darning stockings! It’s dreadful enough your having to do the housework!”
“Eva darned them a good many years,” he said, with some warmth, “and did the housework. Why shouldn’t I?” He looked at her hard and went on, “Do you know what you are saying to me, Mattie Farnham? You are telling me that you really think that homemaking is a poor, mean, cheap job beneath the dignity of anybody who can do anything else.”
Mattie Farnham was for a moment helpless with shock over his attack. When she slowly rose to a
