"I can see a little how it must be; but I suppose I ought to understand the differential calculus to compute it. Circles are wonderful things; and the science of curves holds almost everything.
Rose, when do you think we shall get round again?"
She held up her bit of paper as she spoke, scrawled over with intersecting circles and arcs and ellipses, against whose curves and circ.u.mferences she had written names: Marchbanks, Hadden, Goldthwaite, Holabird.
"It"s a mere question of centre and radius," she said. "You may be big enough to take in the whole of them, or you may only cut in at the sides. You may be just tangent for a minute, and then go off into s.p.a.ce on your own account. You may have your centre barely inside of a great ring, and yet reach pretty well out of it for a good part; you _must_ be small to be taken quite in by anybody"s!"
"It doesn"t ill.u.s.trate," said Rose, coolly. "Orbits don"t snarl up in that fashion."
"Geometry does," said Barbara. "I told you I couldn"t work it all out.
But I suppose there"s a Q.E.D. at the end of it somewhere."
Two or three days after something new happened; an old thing happened freshly, rather,--which also had to do with our orbit and its eccentricities. Barbara, as usual, discovered and announced it.
"I should think _any_ kind of an astronomer might be mad!" she exclaimed. "Periods and distances are bad enough; but then come the perturbations! Here"s one. We"re used to it, to be sure; but we never know exactly where it may come in. The girl we live with has formed other views for herself, and is going off at a tangent. What _is_ the reason we can"t keep a satellite,--planet, I mean?"
"Barbara!" said mother, anxiously, "don"t be absurd!"
"Well, what shall I be? We"re all out of a place again." And she sat down resignedly on a very low cricket, in the middle of the room.
"I"ll tell you what we"ll do, mother," said Ruth, coming round. "I"ve thought of it this good while. We"ll co-operate!"
"She"s glad of it! She"s been waiting for a chance! I believe she put the luminary up to it! Ruth, you"re a brick--moon!"
CHAPTER VI.
CO-OPERATING.
When mother first read that article in the Atlantic she had said, right off,--
"I"m sure I wish they would!"
"Would what, mother?" asked Barbara.
"Co-operate."
"O mother! I really do believe you must belong, somehow, to the Micawber family! I shouldn"t wonder if one of these days, when they come into their luck, you should hear of something greatly to your advantage, from over the water. You have such faith in "they"! I don"t believe "_they_" will ever do much for "_us_"!"
"What is it, dear?" asked Mrs. Hobart, rousing from a little arm-chair wink, during which Mrs. Holabird had taken up the magazine.
Mrs. Hobart had come in, with her cable wool and her great ivory knitting-pins, to sit an hour, sociably.
"Co-operative housekeeping, ma"am," said Barbara.
"Oh! Yes. That is what they _used_ to have, in old times, when we lived at home with mother. Only they didn"t write articles about it.
All the women in a house co-operated--to keep it; and all the neighborhood co-operated--by living exactly in the same way.
Nowadays, it"s co-operative shirking; isn"t it?"
One never could quite tell whether Mrs. Hobart was more simple or sharp.
That was all that was said about co-operative housekeeping at the time. But Ruth remembered the conversation. So did Barbara, for a while, as appeared in something she came out with a few days after.
"I could--almost--write a little poem!" she said, suddenly, over her work. "Only that would be doing just what the rest do. Everything turns into a poem, or an article, nowadays. I wish we"d lived in the times when people _did_ the things!"
"O Barbara! _Think_ of all that is being done in the world!"
"I know. But the little private things. They want to turn everything into a movement. Miss Trixie says they won"t have any eggs from their fowls next winter; all their chickens are roosters, and all they"ll do will be to sit in a row on the fence and crow! I think the world is running pretty much to roosters."
"Is that the poem?"
"I don"t know. It might come in. All I"ve got is the end of it. It came into my head hind side before. If it could only have a beginning and a middle put to it, it might do. It"s just the wind-up, where they have to give an account, you know, and what they"ll have to show for it, and the thing that really amounts, after all."
"Well, tell us."
"It"s only five lines, and one rhyme. But it might be written up to.
They could say all sorts of things,--one and another:--
"_I_ wrote some little books; _I_ said some little says; _I_ preached a little preach; _I_ lit a little blaze; _I_ made things pleasant in one little place."
There was a shout at Barbara"s "poem."
"I thought I might as well relieve my mind," she said, meekly. "I knew it was all there would ever be of it."
But Barbara"s rhyme stayed in our heads, and got quoted in the family.
She ill.u.s.trated on a small scale what the "poems and articles" _may_ sometimes do in the great world,
We remembered it that day when Ruth said, "Let"s co-operate."
We talked it over,--what we could do without a girl. We had talked it over before. We had had to try it, more or less, during interregnums.
But in our little house in Z----, with the dark kitchen, and with Barbara and Ruth going to school, and the washing-days, when we had to hire, it always cost more than it came to, besides making what Barb called a "heave-offering of life."
"They used to have houses built accordingly," Rosamond said, speaking of the "old times." "Grandmother"s kitchen was the biggest and pleasantest room in the house."
"Couldn"t we _make_ the kitchen the pleasantest room?" suggested Ruth. "Wouldn"t it be sure to be, if it was the room we all stayed in mornings, and where we had our morning work? Whatever room we do that in always is, you know. The look grows. Kitchens are horrid when girls have just gone out of them, and left the dish-towels dirty, and the dish-cloth all wabbled up in the sink, and all the tins and irons wanting to be cleaned. But if we once got up a real ladies" kitchen of our own! I can think how it might be lovely!"
"I can think how it might be jolly-nificent!" cried Barbara, relapsing into her dislocations.
"_You_ like kitchens," said Rosamond, in a tone of quiet ill-usedness.
"Yes, I do," said Barbara. "And you like parlors, and prettinesses, and feather dusters, and little general touchings-up, that I can"t have patience with. You shall take the high art, and I"ll have the low realities. That"s the co-operation. Families are put up a.s.sorted, and the home character comes of it. It"s Bible-truth, you know; the head and the feet and the eye and the hand, and all that. Let"s just see what we _shall_ come to! People don"t turn out what they"re meant, who have Irish kitchens and high-style parlors, all alike. There"s a great deal in being Holabirdy,--or whatever-else-you-are-y!"
"If it only weren"t for that cellar-kitchen," said Mrs. Holabird.