is could be made into a productive enterprise. "With a
man and his wife to run it," they could raise squabs by the thousands.
But Ernestine, who had all the business she could attend to with her
laundry, was apathetic. She averred that any man and his wife who could
make money in the poultry business would be exploiting it for
themselves, not for "two green-horn women."

The next proposal was "Violets," and then "Mushrooms," to which
Ernestine was equally indifferent. You had to get your market in every
case, she suspected. "You don't know how to sell violets or mushrooms,
dearie, any more than you know how to raise 'em."

"But I could learn!" Milly pouted. She thought Ernestine was
unenterprising and also underrated her ability, just because she had not
been a working-woman.

"'Twould cost too much for you to learn," Ernestine replied dryly.

Milly's little schemes were oddly always of the luxury order,--to cater
to the luxury-class,--squabs, violets, mushrooms. Her ideas revolved
about the parasitic occupations because they seemed to promise large,
immediate returns. Rebuffed in these first attempts she brought forth no
new scheme for a time, but she was seeking. She envied Ernestine her
manlike independence, her Bank-Account aspect, and wanted to become a
Business Woman.

One invariable objection that Ernestine had made to all Milly's
proposals was:--

"I don't know anything about that business. I know the laundry business
from the skin to the clothes-line and home again--and that's all! It's a
good enough business for me. Everybody has to get washed sometimes!" She
was for the fundamental, basic occupations that dealt in universal human
necessities, and once said to Sam Reddon, who had banteringly offered
her the job of running his new office, "No, thank you! If I ever make a
change from the laundry, I'm going into the liquor business. Every man
seems to need his drink the same as he has to be washed." (This retort
had immensely pleased Reddon, and he was always asking Ernestine when
she would be ready to start a saloon with him.)

At last Milly thought she had cornered Ernestine's favorite objection by
a new scheme, which was nothing less than starting a model "Ideal
Laundry" in some pretty country spot near the city, "where the water is
clean and soft," and there were green lawns and hedges on which to
spread the clothes, "as they do abroad." It was to be manned by a force
of tidy, white-clothed laundresse