“Don’t you know that love mixed in the bread of life makes it easy for the woman to work a large batch for her family, Uncle Tucker?—­and why not butter?  Will you talk to Mr. Newsome the next time he comes and see what he thinks of the plan?  I would tell him about it myself—­only I—­I don’t know why, but I don’t—­want to.”  Rose Mary blushed and looked away across the Road, but her confusion was all unnoticed by Uncle Tucker, who was busily lighting a second pipeful of tobacco.

“Yes, I’ll talk to him and Crabtree both about it,” he answered slowly.  “I can’t hardly bear the idea of your doing it, child, and if it was just me I wouldn’t hear tell of it, but Sister Viney and Sister Amandy—­moved they’d be like a couple of sprouts of their own honeysuckle vine that you had pulled up and left in the sun to wilt.  Home was a place to grow in for women of their day, not just a-kinder waiting shack between stations like it has come to be in these times of women’s uprising—­in the newspapers.”

“We don’t get much new woman excitement out here in Harpeth Valley, Uncle Tucker,” laughed Rose Mary, glad to see him rise once more from the depth of his depression to his usual philosophic level.  “You wouldn’t call—­er—­er Mrs. Poteet a modern woman, would you?”

“Fly-away, Peggy Poteet is the genuine, original mossback and had oughter be expelled from the sex by the confederation president herself,” answered Uncle Tucker as they both glanced down past the milk-house where they saw the comely mother of the seven at her gate administering refreshment in the form of bread and jam to all of her own and quite a number of the other members of the Swarm, including the General and the reclothed and shriven Tobe.  “If there is another Poteet output next April we’ll have to report her,” he added with a laugh.

“But there never was a baby since Stonie like little Tucker,” answered Rose Mary in quick defense of the small namesake of whom Uncle Tucker was secretly but inordinately proud.

“Yes, and I’m a-going to report you to the society of suppression of men folks as a regular spiler, Rose Mary Alloway, if you don’t keep more stern than you are at present with me and Stonie, to say nothing of all the men members of Sweetbriar from Everett clean on through Crabtree down to that very young Tucker Poteet.  You are one of the women that feed and clothe and blush on men like you were borned a hundred years ago and nobody had told you they wasn’t worth shucks.  Are you a-going to reform?”

“I’ll try when I get time,” answered Rose Mary with a smile as she bestowed both a fleeting kiss and the old hat on Uncle Tucker’s forelock over the wall.  “Now I want to run in and make a few cup custards, so I can save one for Mr. Mark when he gets home to-night.  He loves them cold.  Little cooking attentions never spoil men, they just nourish them.  Anyway, what is a woman going to have left to do in life if she sheds the hovering feathers she keeps to tuck her nesties underneath?”