The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman whose inner thoughts are not divined. "He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense," Rankin appealed to the two women. Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. "Oh, nobody ever can make out what he's driving at. I never try." She took out a piece of crochet work. "Lydia, they're at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on. _Would_ you make this in shell stitch? It's much newer, of course, but they say it don't wash so well." As Lydia's attention wavered, "Oh, there's not a particle of use in trying to make out what they're saying. They just go on and on." Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor's back. "I don't, you know, see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a few by hand. I'm no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being too tied up to folks, and I couldn't think of any other way. But I think, now that you've put the idea into my head--I think it would be a good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me--and, by gracious! the girls too! That's one of my convictions--that girls need very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a large business (which I doubt strongly), what's the harm? The motive lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me time and strength to live--'leisure to be good.' Who said that, anyway? It's fine." "_Hymn to Adversity_," supplied the doctor, who was better read in the poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, "Could you, though, do any such thing? Wouldn't it run _you_, once you got to going?" "Well, if worst came to worst--" began Rankin, then changing front, he began again: "My great-aunt--" The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh. "Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until, when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up, heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to--" "You see. You see. That's just what I meant," broke in the doctor.