By this time Jack was ready for a second helping of gingerbread and proceeded. "Don't you see, my dear, that this is an awful waste of muscular energy and stove fuel. Don't you see that consolidation and coöperation at just this point would emancipate these women quite as much as the telephone and the rural delivery? "Furthermore, I believe there is fruit enough that goes to waste every year, which, if rescued, would not only pay for the running of a community kitchen, but also give a handsome bonus for civic beautifying. It is my firm faith that Podunk can earn the foundations of a fine library, within the next three years, by simply saving the waste of fruit and vegetables within her own borders. She has a market already established at the summer colony of Bide-a-wee." The third piece of gingerbread gave Jack the courage to make a clean breast of everything, and to confess that he had called a meeting and made all the necessary arrangements to start a community kitchen for canning and preserving, to be ready this season for the currant crop. Jack always persists that my impulsive opposition is his most helpful ally, so I never feel hindered in giving it. But I said "You have surely never looked at this problem from the psychological standpoint. You have never calculated the personal pride of every housewife in her own handiwork, done in her own way, the way tradition has made sacred to her. Eliminate the personal touch from half the preserve closets of Podunk and you rob them of their glory and half of their flavor. There are some things that cannot be consolidated and coöperated and this is one of them. Why! Mrs. Patterson would be inconsolably wretched, if she thought a jar of peaches would ever stand in her cellar that did not adhere to the formula of one and three-quarters pints of sugar to three pints of water. Now Mrs. Smith is equally loyal to one and one-half parts sugar to three parts water." "And as for jelly making, it has a hedge about it as conservative and invulnerable as a Chinese wall. Instance, our beloved Mrs. Thornton. That splendid spirit of housewifely excellence that we have always admired in her would be wholly inundated and wrecked, if she ever had to set before us, on her own tea-table, a glass of jelly that had been made by heating the currants before they were crushed, and straining the juice through cheesecloth instead of flannel. To Mrs. Thornton there is but one right way, the cold and flannel process. "Even I, Jack, dear, must own up to feeling an unpleasant sensation down my spinal column, and a vexatious agitation in my mind, whenever I see jelly boil more than five minutes after the sugar is added. Nay, my Worthy Wisdom, let me entreat you to carefully consider ere you intrude upon the sacred precincts of jelly-making with any ruthless tread.