Page:Women Wanted.djvu/249

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THE OPEN DOOR IN COMMERCE
229

place. She, during their "vacation," put up a hundred cans of fruit. I think it was between strawberry time and blackberry time that she had to return to town to conduct a case in court. She had cautioned her husband that while she was gone, he be sure to "see about" the little green cucumbers. But, of course, he didn't. What heed does a man—and he happens also to be a judge of one of the higher courts—give to little green cucumbers? Long after they should have been picked, they had grown to be large and yellow, which, as any woman knows, takes them way past their pickling prime. That was how the woman who cared about little green cucumbers found them, when she returned from the city. In despair she threw them all out on the ground. The next day, turning the pages of her cook book, she happened to discover another use for yellow cucumbers. Putting on a blue gingham sunbonnet, she went out to the field back of the orchard and laboriously gathered them all up again. And she could not rest until on the shelf in her farm house cellar stood three stone crocks filled with sweet cucumber pickle. She just couldn't bear to see those cucumbers go to waste. It is the sense of thrift inculcated by generations of forbears whose occupation was the practice of housewifery.

The Judge doesn't have any such feeling about pickles or any other household affairs. When he goes home at night, he reads or smokes or plays billiards. When the lady who is his law partner goes home, even though their New York residence is at