you, a woman
'ull bake you a pie every week of her life and never come to see that
the hotter th' oven the shorter the time. I tell you, a woman 'ull make
your porridge every day for twenty years and never think of measuring
the proportion between the meal and the milk--a little more or less,
she'll think, doesn't signify. The porridge WILL be awk'ard now and
then: if it's wrong, it's summat in the meal, or it's summat in the
milk, or it's summat in the water. Look at me! I make my own bread, and
there's no difference between one batch and another from year's end to
year's end; but if I'd got any other woman besides Vixen in the house,
I must pray to the Lord every baking to give me patience if the bread
turned out heavy. And as for cleanliness, my house is cleaner than any
other house on the Common, though the half of 'em swarm with women. Will
Baker's lad comes to help me in a morning, and we get as much cleaning
done in one hour, without any fuss, as a woman 'ud get done in three,
and all the while be sending buckets o' water after your ankles, and let
the fender and the fire-irons stand in the middle o' the floor half the
day for you to break your shins against 'em. Don't tell me about God
having made such creatures to be companions for us! I don't say but
He might make Eve to be a companion to Adam in Paradise--there was no
cooking to be spoilt there, and no other woman to cackle with and make
mischief, though you see what mischief she did as soon as she'd an
opportunity. But it's an impious, unscriptural opinion to say a woman's
a blessing to a man now; you might as well say adders and wasps, and
foxes and wild beasts are a blessing, when they're only the evils that
belong to this state o' probation, which it's lawful for a man to keep
as clear of as he can in this life, hoping to get quit of 'em for ever
in another--hoping to get quit of 'em for ever in another."

Bartle had become so excited and angry in the course of his invective
that he had forgotten his supper, and only used the knife for the
purpose of rapping the table with the haft. But towards the close, the
raps became so sharp and frequent, and his voice so quarrelsome, that
Vixen felt it incumbent on her to jump out of the hamper and bark
vaguely.

"Quiet, Vixen!" snarled Bartle, turning round upon her. "You're like the
rest o' the women--always putting in your word before you know why."

Vixen returned to her hamper again in humiliation, and her ma