he students were
to live in cottages and learn the domestic arts through their own
housekeeping, the members of each household performing various duties in
rotation. The school was to continue in session the year round, so that
flower--and kitchen--gardening might take rank with dressmaking,
cooking, fruit culture, poultry raising, and other branches which Mrs.
Owen proposed to have taught.

"I can't set 'em all up in business, but I want a girl that goes through
the school to feel that she won't have to break her back in an overall
factory all her life, or dance around some floor-walker with a waxed
mustache. They tell me no American girl who has ever seen a trolley car
will go into a kitchen to work--she can't have her beaux going round to
the back door. Sylvia, we've got to turn out cooks that are worth going
to kitchen doors to see! Now, I've taught you this summer how to make
currant jelly that you needn't be ashamed of anywhere on earth, and it
didn't hurt you any. A white woman can't learn to cook the way darkies
do, just by instinct. That's a miracle, by the way, that I never heard
explained--how these colored women cook as the good ones do--those
old-fashioned darkies who take the cook book out of your hand and look
at it upside down and grin and say, 'Yes, Miss Sally,' when they can't
read a word! You catch a clean, wholesome white girl young enough, and
make her understand that her kitchen's a laboratory, and her work
something to be proud of, and she'll not have any trouble finding places
to work where they won't ask her to clean out the furnace and wash the
automobile."

The Bassetts had opened their cottage early and Morton Bassett had been
at the lake rather more constantly than in previous summers. Marian was
off on a round of visits to the new-found friends that were the fruit
of her winter at the capital. She was much in demand for house parties,
and made her engagements, quite independently of her parents, for weeks
and fortnights at widely scattered mid-Western resorts. Mrs. Bassett was
indulging in the luxury of a trained nurse this summer, but even with
this reinforcement she found it impossible to manage Marian. It need
hardly be said that Mrs. Owen's philanthropic enterprises occasioned her
the greatest alarm. It was enough that "that girl" should be spending
the summer at Waupegan, without bringing with her all her fellow
boarders from Elizabeth House.

Mrs. Bassett had now a tangible grievan