g steady for a long time and
I got dead tired of the crowd. The bum faces and the cheap girls and the
dirty restaurants and the fresh waiters got on my nerves and it even
spoiled my work. Mrs. Smith has been after me for a long time to leave
it. She just talks to me and talks to me every time I go over there. I
got half sick and went over to Lake Rest for a couple of weeks, and I
used to lie at nights up in my room a hearing the sounds and a feeling
the quiet, and in some way it made me hate the sidewalks and the hot
dusty streets and the dance halls and the nights when I was up till
morning and the days when I was a feeling like a boiled owl. I talked it
all over with Mrs. Smith and she didn't want me to do clerking, cause I
would still have to live in a room, and it is the people in the rooming
houses she is dead sore at. She wants me to do something that will take
me away from the crowd. Then she asked me if I would be willing to do
house work. I told her I would be willing to try scrubbing, that
sometimes it seemed that any old thing was better than what I have been
doing for the last seven years. But I told her I didn't know nothing
about housework, as I don't remember ever having been in a real house
except hers. I lived in furnished rooms all my life but I was willing to
learn and it seems to me if you are only willing to try, you can learn
anything. I stayed with her two weeks, and she showed me how to cook
potatoes, to fix meat, and I think the first day I made an apple pie all
by myself, I nearly bust with pride. Why, Kate, there is a joy in just
making something. To take some apples and some flour and butter and lard
and to fix it all yourself, then take it out of the oven crisp and hot
and have some one say, "Ain't that fine"! Why, you feel you have really
_done_ something. It must be like when an artist paints a great picture.
I had _made_ something, something that is a part of me. The last week I
was there, she let me get all the meals, and if I ever marry a man, I
would want to do all the cooking myself. I don't think there could be
any bigger happiness for a woman who really loved her man, than to see
him eat the food that she had fixed with her own hands, and if I could
hear a man of mine say, "Pass me them biscuits, Nan," or "You sure can
make good gravey," well--I would have all that is coming to me. I
learned to set a table and how to put the right knives and the right
forks in the right places, and I