Mifflin, only Alvin isn't quite
so stylish. He is a clerk in the drug store in Mifflin and he was real
pleasant. When Gladys and I only had a nickel he'd let us have a glass
of ice cream soda with two spoons. He was such a pleasant man. But what
did Mr. Jerry mean," she returned to her mutton with a suddenness that
made Miss Thorley blur a line, "when he said you were under the spell of
the wicked witch Independence?"

"How should I know?" And Miss Thorley frowned in a way that made Mary
Rose wish she wouldn't. It quite spoiled her face to frown with it.

"What is Independence?" Mary Rose frowned, too. As Aunt Kate had said,
frowns were contagious. Mary Rose had caught one now in a flash.

Miss Thorley took up a handful of brushes and regarded them intently
before she said slowly: "Independence is the greatest thing in the world,
Mary Rose. It means that I can live as I choose, where I choose, that I
can pay my own bills, buy my own clothes and food, that I can do exactly
as I please and as I think best. The independence of women is the most
wonderful thing in this wonderful age."

Mary Rose looked puzzled. Mr. Jerry had not spoken of it as if it were
such a wonderful thing. She looked around the pretty room with its
simple furnishings and then at Miss Thorley.

"Does it mean you aren't ever going to be married?" she asked doubtfully.
In Mifflin all the girls as big as Miss Thorley meant to be married.

"It means exactly that." Miss Thorley's pretty lips were pressed closer
together. "Work, Mary Rose, is the most important thing in life."

But Mary Rose was horrified. "Aren't you ever going to make a home for a
family?" she cried. She couldn't believe that was what Miss Thorley
meant and she dropped a jam jar. "You don't have to stop work to do it,"
she cried eagerly and helpfully after she had retrieved the jar. "Mrs.
Evans, she's Gladys' mother, says she'd think the millennium was here if
she didn't have any work to do. She has five children at home and three
in the cemetery." Miss Thorley shuddered. "She can cook and sew and
sweep and play the piano and she belongs to the Woman's Club and the
Missionary Society and the Revolution Daughters and the Presbyterian
Church. You don't ever have to stop working to make a home for a
family," she repeated with a nod of encouragement to Miss Thorley who
looked disgusted instead of pleased as Mary Rose had expected she would
look.

"That isn't the