d me--and, by
gracious! the girls too! That's one of my convictions--that girls need
very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a
large business (which I doubt strongly), what's the harm? The motive
lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big
businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that
the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as
possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as
much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me
time and strength to live--'leisure to be good.' Who said that, anyway?
It's fine."

"_Hymn to Adversity_," supplied the doctor, who was better read in the
poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, "Could you,
though, do any such thing? Wouldn't it run _you_, once you got to
going?"

"Well, if worst came to worst--" began Rankin, then changing front, he
began again: "My great-aunt--"

The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.

"Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me
that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling
together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until,
when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big
three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they
moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and
more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up,
heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine
house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big
grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to--"

"You see. You see. That's just what I meant," broke in the doctor.

"Well, I'm a near relative of my great-aunt's. One day, when all the
rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to
the ground, with everything in it."

"She didn't!" broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful
attention by the promise of a coherent story.

Rankin laughed. "Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don't
doubt she _would_ have," he amended.

The doctor grunted, "Huh! But would _you_!" He went on, "You couldn't
compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn't concentrate everything
on making chairs. Don't you know the successful business man's best
advertisement? 'All of my life-streng