"I can't see any other shelter than the Briars, Uncle Tucker, and there isn't going to be any other," answered Rose Mary as she stroked the old hat in her hand. "You know sometimes men run right against a stone wall when a woman can see a door plainly in front of them both. She just looks for the door and don't ask to know who is going to open it from the other side. Our door is there I know--I have been looking for it for a long time. Right now it looks like a cow gate to me," and a little reluctant smile came over Rose Mary's grave face as if she were being forced to give up a cherished secret before she were ready for the revelation. "And if the gate sticks, Rose Mary, I believe you'll climb the fence and pull us all over, whether or no," answered Uncle Tucker with a slightly comforted expression coming into his eyes. "You're one of the women who knot a bridle out of a horse's own tail to drive him with. Have you got this scheme already geared up tight, ready to start?" "It's only that Mr. Crabtree brought word from town that the big grocery he sells my butter to would agree to take any amount I could send them at a still larger price. If we could hold on to the place, buy more cows and all the milk other people in Sweetbriar have to sell I believe I could make the interest and more than the interest every year. But if Mr. Newsome needs the money, I am afraid--he might not like to wait. It would be a year before I could see exactly how things succeed--and that's a long time." "Yes, and it would mean for you to just be a-turning yourself into meat and drink for the family, nothing more or less, Rose Mary. You work like you was a single filly hitched to a two-horse wagon now, and that would be just piling fence rails on top of the load of hay you are already a-drawing for all of us old live stock. You couldn't work all that butter." "Don't you know that love mixed in the bread of life makes it easy for the woman to work a large batch for her family, Uncle Tucker?--and why not butter? Will you talk to Mr. Newsome the next time he comes and see what he thinks of the plan? I would tell him about it myself--only I--I don't know why, but I don't--want to." Rose Mary blushed and looked away across the Road, but her confusion was all unnoticed by Uncle Tucker, who was busily lighting a second pipeful of tobacco. "Yes, I'll talk to him and Crabtree both about it," he answered slowly. "I can't hardly bear the idea of your doing it, child, and if it was just me I wouldn't hear tell of it, but Sister Viney and Sister Amandy--moved they'd be like a couple of sprouts of their own honeysuckle vine that you had pulled up and left in the sun to wilt. Home was a place to grow in for women of their day, not just a-kinder waiting shack between stations like it has come to be in these times of women's uprising--in the newspapers."