“They can use the teachers’ rooms while the teachers are away,” Grandma explained. “Don’t you see, Lois, they can sleep daytimes while the teachers are at school?”

When Aunt Lois expostulated that the teachers wouldn’t like it, Grandma explained, “They needn’t know. My goodness, Lois, I could nip upstairs and wake them before the teachers got home, couldn’t I? My glory, Lois, don’t you want to make a little extra money? I don’t want to just work for nothing all my life. Never mind! Let it go! I’ll have a place of my own one of these days.”

A fine thing about Grandma was that she never seemed to admit any difference between children and grown-ups, so she was as apt to confide her career plans to Marcia and Lena as to anyone else, or if she stayed with them to let them stay up till it was her own bedtime. Marcia played here while Lena was at school, and Grandma let her stir cake batter or peel potatoes or help make beds while she talked about her plans.

“Lois has had a lot of trouble in her life, what with losing her baby and having Charlie run off on her like he did,” she said. “But on the other hand there’s plenty Lois don’t understand. A person can work their fingers to the bone on a farm, doing chores and raising ten children, all for nothing, and that’s all right. But a body with a little more ambition is supposed to take a backseat. It’s not fair.”

“No,” Marcia gravely agreed. “It’s not fair. If I was you, Grandma, I’d run away.”

“I will,” her grandmother said resolutely. “I’m not going to take a backseat all my life. No matter what my own flesh and blood think. Why, I got more get-up-and-git in my little finger than the lot of them. I’ll show them.”

She had a friend, just as Lena had, a lady named Mrs. Carmel who used to run a millinery store in town but now lived in Cleveland. Mrs. Carmel had written her to come to Cleveland and start a rooming house, as there was a perfect fortune in it. It would be a real treat, Mrs. Carmel’s letter said, to have an old friend there, and she needn’t mind missing her lodge work as there were plenty Lady Maccabees and DARS and Eastern Stars in Cleveland as well as a Women’s Relief Corps. Every time Aunt Lois made an objection to something Grandma did, Grandma would go up to her big front room and read over Mrs. Carmel’s letter sometimes aloud to Marcia.