Missouri Country Life Conference. 173 



You don't grade Columbia by the slums that are here, but 

 grade it by the magnificent homes in your city; you do not 

 grade your country excepting hit or miss. You will find that is 

 done the universe over. And so when I say the city I do not 

 mean your best or your poorest. When I speak of the country 

 I mean the average country home, because the country averages 

 much fairer than the city. 



The country woman goes to the town and what does she do? 

 You know you did the chores before you started; perhaps you go 

 with her, and it is going to be supper time when you get home. 

 She goes there and buys what she has to have and buys it in a 

 hurry. She is not acquainted with the clerks; maybe she is a 

 little afraid of them. They are not as kind to her as they might 

 be and she buys the first thing she sees, perhaps, in order to get 

 out and get away from there. She loves the beautiful, and she 

 will buy, nine times out of ten, stronger colors than the woman 

 who makes a study of those things. She wears brighter colors, 

 and she ought not to do it. She does not study harmony be- 

 cause she does not have time, she thinks. And so we find those 

 things with the country woman. They are just a part of her, 

 not because of the difference in heart, but because of the dif- 

 ference in her environment; difference in her experience in buy- 

 ing, the difference in her time. The town woman goes down 

 and looks around and goes home and thinks it over; goes to 

 another store another day with another friend and gets the 

 benefit of her remarks, and so perhaps it will be two or three or 

 four weeks before she buys. But the country woman goes to 

 town and finishes it up and goes home. Longing to have her 

 home bright and pretty, she puts in the louder colors. Go to the 

 dry goods stores and the paper stores here in your city and find 

 where that man turns over and over until he comes to the paper 

 that has black specks all over it and tells the woman that it is 

 good kitchen paper because it don't show flyspecks. Putting a 

 premium on dirt, but he does it. Have you not just as good a 

 right to have a good kitchen as the woman in town? Why 

 should the kitchen show flyspecks and the parlor not? But 

 that sort of thing is done in every state in the Union, done every 

 day of the world, and the country woman says: "I cannot help 

 it; I cannot have things the way I want them, but I do the best 

 I can." God bless her for it, but if she would only stop a while 

 and wonder what is the limit to her best and then work toward 

 that limit as fast as she can. 



