cted company comin',
and no girl. Let a lot of company come to stay all day the relations on
your side and the work not done, and me posin' like a statute, lookin'
down on you and your sect, you'd feel like a fool and jaw, you know you
would. I presoom you'd throw your boot-jack at me and threaten to part
with me, and how mean that would be in you when I did it at your
request. 'Tain't anything any woman would go into if she wuz let alone."

"And then think of the thrashers and silo fillers comin' in hungry as
bears, what would they say? No dinner cookin' and I on a pedestal, why
it would be the town's talk. Or you comin' home from Jonesville on a
cold night fraxious as a dog and sayin' you should die off if you didn't
have supper in ten minutes. How could I git it on time perched up there?

"I say it can't be done, and it is onreasonable for men to want it, and
at the same time want wimmen to do her own housework. For these men,
every one on 'em, would act like fury if their house wuzn't clean and
their clothes in order, and meals on time. And you must know it would
jest about kill a woman to be doin' all this and histin' herself up and
down a hundred times a day, and mebby half dead with rumatiz too. Why,
it would be worse for me than all the rest of my work, and you hadn't
ort to ask it of me."

Josiah looked real huffy and sez, "I hain't the only man that's wantin'
it done; men have always been sot on it. There's been more'n a wagon
load of poetry writ on it and you know it. Men have always said a sight
about it, I hain't alone in it," he snapped out.

"No," sez I honestly, "I've hearn it before. But you see it wouldn't
work, don't you? And I believe I could convince every man if I could git
to 'em and talk it over with 'em. And I don't see where the beauty on't
would come in; of course a woman couldn't change her clothes and put on
Greek drapery right in the midst of cleanin' the buttery shelves or
moppin' off the back steps. And to see a woman standin' up on a pedestal
with an old calico dress pinned up round her waist and a slat sunbunnet
on and her pardner's rubber boots, and her sleeves rolled up, and her
face red as blood with hard work, and her hands all swelled up with hot
soap suds and lye, what beauty would there be in it? It always did seem
onreasonable besides bein' so tuckerin' no woman could stand it for a
day."

He looked mad as a hen and sez he, "They could manage it if their minds
wuz strong en