Little Lady of the Big House | Page 7

hoof."

"He knew better."
"Send him down the hill," Forrest repeated, as he tickled his champing
mount with the slightest of spur-tickles and shot her out along the road,
sidling, head-tossing, and attempting to rear.
Much he saw that pleased him. Once, he murmured aloud, "A fat land,
a fat land." Divers things he saw that did not please him and that won a
note in his scribble pad. Completing the circle about the Big House and
riding beyond the circle half a mile to an isolated group of sheds and
corrals, he reached the objective of the ride: the hospital. Here he found
but two young heifers being tested for tuberculosis, and a magnificent
Duroc Jersey boar in magnificent condition. Weighing fully six
hundred pounds, its bright eyes, brisk movements, and sheen of hair
shouted out that there was nothing the matter with it. Nevertheless,
according to the ranch practice, being a fresh importation from Iowa, it
was undergoing the regular period of quarantine. Burgess Premier was
its name in the herd books of the association, age two years, and it had
cost Forrest five hundred dollars laid down on the ranch.
Proceeding at a hand gallop along a road that was one of the spokes
radiating from the Big House hub, Forrest overtook Crellin, his hog
manager, and, in a five-minute conference, outlined the next few
months of destiny of Burgess Premier, and learned that the brood sow,
Lady Isleton, the matron of all matrons of the O. I. C.'s and blue-
ribboner in all shows from Seattle to San Diego, was safely farrowed of
eleven. Crellin explained that he had sat up half the night with her and
was then bound home for bath and breakfast.
"I hear your oldest daughter has finished high school and wants to enter
Stanford," Forrest said, curbing the mare just as he had half- signaled
departure at a gallop.
Crellin, a young man of thirty-five, with the maturity of a long-time
father stamped upon him along with the marks of college and the
youthfulness of a man used to the open air and straight-living, showed
his appreciation of his employer's interest as he half-flushed under his
tan and nodded.

"Think it over," Forrest advised. "Make a statistic of all the college
girls--yes, and State Normal girls--you know. How many of them
follow career, and how many of them marry within two years after their
degrees and take to baby farming."
"Helen is very seriously bent on the matter," Crellin urged.
"Do you remember when I had my appendix out?" Forrest queried.
"Well, I had as fine a nurse as I ever saw and as nice a girl as ever
walked on two nice legs. She was just six months a full-fledged nurse,
then. And four months after that I had to send her a wedding present.
She married an automobile agent. She's lived in hotels ever since. She's
never had a chance to nurse--never a child of her own to bring through
a bout with colic. But... she has hopes... and, whether or not her hopes
materialize, she's confoundedly happy. But... what good was her
nursing apprenticeship?"
Just then an empty manure-spreader passed, forcing Crellin, on foot,
and Forrest, on his mare, to edge over to the side of the road. Forrest
glanced with kindling eye at the off mare of the machine, a huge,
symmetrical Shire whose own blue ribbons, and the blue ribbons of her
progeny, would have required an expert accountant to enumerate and
classify.
"Look at the Fotherington Princess," Forrest said, nodding at the mare
that warmed his eye. "She is a normal female. Only incidentally,
through thousands of years of domestic selection, has man evolved her
into a draught beast breeding true to kind. But being a draught-beast is
secondary. Primarily she is a female. Take them by and large, our own
human females, above all else, love us men and are intrinsically
maternal. There is no biological sanction for all the hurly burly of
woman to-day for suffrage and career."
"But there is an economic sanction," Crellin objected.
"True," his employer agreed, then proceeded to discount. "Our present
industrial system prevents marriage and compels woman to career. But,
remember, industrial systems come, and industrial systems go, while

biology runs on forever."
"It's rather hard to satisfy young women with marriage these days," the
hog-manager demurred.
Dick Forrest laughed incredulously.
"I don't know about that," he said. "There's your wife for an instance.
She with her sheepskin--classical scholar at that--well, what has she
done with it?... Two boys and three girls, I believe? As I remember
your telling me, she was engaged to you the whole last half of her
senior year."
"True, but--" Crellin insisted, with an eye-twinkle of appreciation of the
point, "that was fifteen years ago,