"Maybe not,—because you don't set to work the right way," said Mrs. Simmons. "Give in to a child because he cries, or bribe him to be good, and your mastery over him is gone. But once make him understand that you mean what you say, and that he has to do what he's told, and your trouble's at an end. Why, dear me, I wonder what my mother would have said, when I was a girl, if any one of us—and she had a dozen children—had set up for a moment against her will. Not we! There wasn't such a thing known among us. Mother's will was law, and no mistake. But for all that we loved her more than I can tell, and she did toil for us. The world never looked the same to me, Mrs. Humphrey, since mother died." "Everybody isn't like that, though," Janet said hopelessly, as Mrs. Simmons placed the teapot on the table. CHAPTER V. A DANGER ESCAPED. MRS. SIMMONS gave Janet Humphrey a little more good advice still, before she had done with her: and Janet took the good advice humbly. For whatever Janet's faults might be, she had not among them the silly pride which will not bear to be told of being in the wrong. "I am sure I wish I could do better," she said, standing at the open door with Betsy Simmons, when the latter was about to leave. "I don't pretend to say everything is as it should be. But it isn't so easy to keep straight as some folks fancy." "No, that it isn't," said Mrs. Simmons. "I'm on your side of the matter there. It isn't easy to get out of bad habits and into good ones. A deal of striving and praying have to go to it." "Why, Mrs. Simmons, you wouldn't surely have me pray about keeping my house straight!" "And about getting up early, and having the rooms clean, and the children tidy, and the meals comfortable! Surely I would," said Betsy Simmons. "I don't see that you're likely to get things right without praying. You've a deal to fight against—laziness and forgetfulness and what-not! And you'll want help from above, if ever a woman does." "But such little things," remonstrated Janet. "Ah, that's where you mistake," said Mrs. Simmons. "That's where you and others go wrong. They are not little things at all, but big things. It don't seem so very much, perhaps, if one day or another you don't get done in time, and the place is all of a muck, and the children are in a mess, and the dinner isn't properly cooked, and your husband goes somewhere else for the comfort he can't find in his own house. Maybe each time it's a small matter alone. But it's no small matter if you stop short of your duty in that state of life where God has put you. And it won't be a small matter, if your husband is driven from his home so often that at last he takes to the public-house instead." "My husband isn't one of them as is for ever in and out at the public," said Janet hastily, forgetting her own lately-expressed fear.