City and town life -- Fiction; Foundlings -- Fiction
"For them that had left cloth bleaching in their side yards and was
saving the price of buying bleached. For them that had done their day's
work, from parlour to wood-shed, and had hurried up the supper dishes
and changed their dress and was on their way to the schoolhouse. For
them that had lived lives like this and had died at it. For all the
little dog-eared, wore-out account books where every one of them women
figured out careful what they couldn't spend. And I looked down the
street till I couldn't see no farther, and yet Daphne Street was going
on, round and round the world, and acrost and acrost it, full of women
doing the same identical way. And I could see away off to the places
that Daphne Street led past, where women has all these things done for
them and where the factories is setting them free, like us here in the
village ain't free just yet, and I felt a wicked envy for them that can
set their hands to the New Work, that us here in Friendship Village is
trying so hard to get in between whiles. And I could see away ahead to
times when sponge and currants and clothes and coops and similar won't
have to be mothered by women 'most as much as children are; but when
women, Away Off Then, will be mothers and workers and general human
beings such as yet we only know how to think about being, scrappy and
wishful. But all the time, in their arms and in ours and nowheres else,
lays all the rest of the world that is ever going to be. And something
in me kind of climbed out of me and run along ahead and looked back at
me over its shoulder and says: 'Keep up, keep up, Calliope.' And before
I knew it, right out loud, I says: 'I will. I will.'
"An hour later, up in the schoolhouse, Silas Sykes stood arguing, to
the top of his tone, that the first work of the reorganized
society--that was to take in the whole town--had ought to be to buy a
bargain Cupid-and-fish fountain he knew of, for the market square.
"'It's going to take years and years to do--everything,' says Mis'
Emmons to me, low.
"But that didn't seem like much of anything to either of us. 'What if it
is,' I says. And she nodded."
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mothers to Men, by Zona Gale
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account