neighbors were less likely to drop in if the house was closed
up. She was one of those people who are stingy without
motive or reason, even when they can gain nothing by it.
She must have known that skimping the doctor in heat
and food made him more extravagant than he would have
been had she made him comfortable. He never came home
for lunch, because she gave him such miserable scraps and
shreds of food. No matter how much milk he bought, he
could never get thick cream for his strawberries. Even
when he watched his wife lift it from the milk in smooth,
ivory-colored blankets, she managed, by some sleight-of-
hand, to dilute it before it got to the breakfast table. The
butcher's favorite joke was about the kind of meat he sold
Mrs. Archie. She felt no interest in food herself, and she
hated to prepare it. She liked nothing better than to have
Dr. Archie go to Denver for a few days--he often went
chiefly because he was hungry--and to be left alone to
eat canned salmon and to keep the house shut up from
morning until night.

Mrs. Archie would not have a servant because, she said,
"they ate too much and broke too much"; she even said
they knew too much. She used what mind she had in
devising shifts to minimize her housework. She used to
tell her neighbors that if there were no men, there would

be no housework. When Mrs. Archie was first married,
she had been always in a panic for fear she would have