was, of course, ridiculous, and she would
never be able to make anyone see that it was ridiculous. But that was
not all. The very business itself absolutely disgusted her. It disgusted
her to such a point that she would have preferred to do it with her own
hands in secret rather than see others do it openly in all its squalor.
The business might be more efficiently organized--for example, there was
no reason why the sitting-room should be made uninhabitable between
breakfast and dinner once a week--but it could never be other than
odious. The kitchen floor must inevitably be washed every day by a girl
on her knees in sackcloth with terrible hands. She was witnessing now
the first stage in the progress of a victim of the business of
domesticity. To-day Florrie was a charming young creature, full of
slender grace. Soon she would be a dehumanized drudge. And Hilda could
not stop it! All over the town, in every street of the town, behind all
the nice curtains and blinds, the same hidden shame was being enacted: a
vast, sloppy, steaming, greasy, social horror--inevitable! It amounted
to barbarism, Hilda thought in her revolt. She turned from it with
loathing. And yet nobody else seemed to turn from it with loathing.
Nobody else seemed to perceive that this business of domesticity was not
life itself, was at best the clumsy external machinery of life. On the
contrary, about half the adult population worshipped it as an exercise
sacred and paramount, enlarging its importance and with positive gusto
permitting it to monopolize their existence. Nine-tenths of her mother's
conversation was concerned with the business of domesticity--and withal
Mrs. Lessways took the business more lightly than most!

III

There was an impatient knock at the front door,--rare phenomenon, but
not unknown.

Mrs. Lessways cried out thickly from the folds of her flannel petticoat:

"Hilda, just see who that is, will you?... knocking like that! Florrie
can't come."

And just as Hilda reached the front door, her mother opened the kitchen
door wide, to view the troublesome disturber and to inform him, if as
was probable he was exceeding his rights, that he would have done better
to try the back door.

It was Mr. Cannon at the front door.

Hilda heard the kitchen door slammed to behind her, but the noise was
like a hallucination in her brain. She was staggered by the apparition
of Mr. Cannon in the porch. She had vaguely wondered what he might d