Mrs. Brown settled back in her chair with a relieved sigh. "We
women," she went on vigorously, "have mismanaged every separate work
that was ever put into our hands! We ought to be ashamed to live. We
cumber--"

"Here!" said the doctor, smiling in lazy comfort over his pipe,
"that's heresy! I refuse to listen to it. My wife is a woman, my
mother, unless I am misinformed, was another--"

"Don't mind him!" said Mrs. Brown, "but go on! What have we all
done? We manage our houses, and dress our children, and feed our
husbands, it seems to me."

"Well, there's the big business of motherhood," began Mrs. Burgoyne,
"the holiest and highest thing God ever let a mortal do. We evade it
and ignore it to such an extent that the nation--and other nations--
grows actually alarmed, and men begin to frame laws to coax us back
to the bearing of children. Then, if we have them, we turn the
entire responsibility over to other people. A raw little foreigner
of some sort answers the first questions our boys and girls ask,
until they are old enough to be put under some nice, inexperienced
young girl just out of normal school, who has fifty or sixty of them
to manage, and of whose ideas upon the big questions of life we know
absolutely nothing. We say lightheartedly that 'girls always go
through a trying age,' and that we suppose boys 'have to come in
contact with things,' and we let it go at that! We 'suppose there
has always been vice, and always will be,' but we never stop to
think that we ourselves are setting the poor girls of the other
world such an example in the clothes we wear, and the pleasures we
take, that they will sell even themselves for pretty gowns and