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."