society. To be sure, for something like half of this period,
she had been of society if not in it. She had done the family washings,
scrubbings and cleanings, had made the family clothes and been a woman of
all work, passing from household to household, in an orbit determined by
the exigencies of threshing, harvesting, illness and child-bearing. At
such times she sat at the family table and participated in the
neighborhood gossip, in quite the manner of a visiting aunt or other
female relative; but in spite of the democracy of rural life, there is and
always has been a social difference between a hired woman and an invited
guest. And when Jim, having absorbed everything which the Woodruff school
could give him in the way of education, found his first job at "making a
hand," Mrs. Irwin, at her son's urgent request, ceased going out to work
for a while, until she could get back her strength. This she had never
succeeded in doing, and for a dozen years or more had never entered a
single one of the houses in which she had formerly served.

"I can't go, James," said she; "I can't possibly go."

"Oh, yes, you can! Why not?" said Jim. "Why not?"

"You know I don't go anywhere," urged Mrs. Irwin.

"That's no reason," said her son.

"I haven't a thing to wear," said Mrs. Irwin.

"Nothing to wear!"

I wonder if any ordinary person can understand the shock with which Jim
Irwin heard those words from his mother's lips. He was approaching thirty,
and the association of the ideas of Mother and Costume was foreign to his
mind. Other women had surfaces different from hers, to be sure--but his
mother was not as other women. She was just Mother, always at work in the
house or in the garden, always doing for him those inevitable things which
made up her part in life, always clothed in the browns, grays, gray-blues,
neutral stripes and checks which were cheap and common and easily made.
Clothes! They were in the Irwin family no more than things by which the
rules of decency were complied with, and the cold of winter turned
back--but as for their appearance! Jim had never given the thing a thought
further than to wear out his Sunday best in the schoolroom, to wonder
where the next suit of Sunday best was to come from, and to buy for his
mother the cheap and common fabrics which she fashioned into the garments
in which alone, it seemed to him, she would seem like Mother. A boy who
lives until he is nearly thirty in intimate companions