“If Guy were to be gone but a short time, if I knew that, could feel certain of it, I would simply stay here and keep things as they are,” she declared. “The children come first in any calculation I may make. But if I knew he were to be gone for a period of years I’d do quite differently. I’d go into something, something where I could have them with me and where we’d all be pretty constantly at work together. A big farm, I think. I don’t know anything about farming, but I dare say I could learn something about it, and surely a boy like John could learn it from the ground up--or perhaps farming is learned from the ground down,” she finished, smilingly. “What I am getting at is this,” she went on. “I feel the need of productive labour. I am not a theorist and I have no set of passionate political or economic interests. But I count it a real misfortune that at this crisis in my life I do not have to work for my living and my children’s living. It would be better for me if I had to, and it will be better for them if they are trained to. Under the trust left by Guy I can’t impoverish myself and the children if I wished to; and certainly I don’t wish to. Money is an obligation, just as much as any other form of property, and more than most. The obligation is to use it as rightly as you know how, as productively as you can. And that obligation certainly isn’t discharged by filling our five mouths with food and putting clothes on the five of us. It is rather more fitly discharged by educating ourselves, but it can only be fully discharged in the end by productive labour. That’s the conscientious and dutiful view I take of it; from the purely selfish view there is a good deal also to be said for a big farm. We need a new set of interests and healthful occupation. It needn’t be a farm, except that I can’t think of any other productive occupation where the children could healthfully bear their share. I couldn’t,” she added, humorously, “organize a factory for the five of us nor set up a factory in which we would be much use to the world or to ourselves.” “You could carry out this idea, anyway,” Tom Lupton meditated aloud.