Belles on their Toes

method was to cut one row up, and then one row back, and then one row up again.
    "Very ingenious," Mr. Yoyogo told him, with a straight face. "Now in Japan we never thought of that. We cut one row up, then carry the lawn mower on our shoulders back to where we started, and cut other row up."
    "There's a lot of things I can learn you," Tom assured him. "Why don't you try it my way, and see how it works?"
    The Japanese, who really did like exercise, started out with the lawn mower. Tom sat down on the grass, to give instruction in case Yoyo should get mixed up and hoist the lawn mower up on his shoulders.
    Mother, Miss Lies, and the girls came out and sat the hammocks on the side porch, where they could watch the football game. Mother held Jane on her lap, and darned socks. Miss Lies showed Ernestine and Martha a new way to roll up their hair.
    Mr. Bruce called his team back into a huddle and explained that the next play would be a long pass to Bill, in the end zone. The Englishman, who was backing up the line of the opposing team, slapped his squatting lineman on the part of the anatomy that was nearest him, and urged them to fight fiercely.
    Tom was half asleep, dragging indolently on a cigarette, in the front yard. Mr. Yoyogo, having sheared the front grass to perfection, guided the lawn mower resolutely toward the back yard, where the grass as nearly six inches high.

    Mother told us at supper, after her students had gone back to New York for the night, that they had agreed a little exercise period every day would beneficial.
    "I want to tell you how much I appreciate your being so cooperative," she said. "I know it's not easy to have strangers running around the house and yard."
    "Aw, that's all right," Bill said.
    "And I don't want you girls to think that you have to change your clothes every afternoon, or you boys to think you have to play football with them, if you on't want to."
    "Will there be tea tomorrow?" Ernestine asked eagerly.
    "A little after three o'clock," Mother nodded.
    "We should be able to start the game by 3:30, at the latest," Frank said.

10
EFFICIENCY KITCHEN

    Mother thought one way she might get motion study contracts was to apply time-saving methods to the kitchen. Manufacturers would listen to a woman, she believed, when the subject was home appliances. If the only way to enter a man's field was through the kitchen door, that's the way she'd enter.
    Her students helped her build an electric food mixer, and draw up blueprints for new types of electric stoves and refrigerators. Mother planned, on paper, an efficiency-type kitchenette of the kind used today in a good many apartments. Under her arrangement, a person could mix a cake, put it in the oven, and do the dishes, without taking more than a couple of dozen steps.
    On the strength of her blueprints, she landed a contract with a New York electric concern. The fee was one Dad wouldn't have considered. But it was the first job Mother had got on her own, and she as proud of it.
    Someone in the electric company told the newspapers about the contract. A woman engineer with eleven children was considered good copy. And in 1924 the idea of a scientifically planned kitchen was news.
    The company arranged a press conference for Mother in New York. The resulting stories, besides telling of Mother's plans, managed to give the impression that our kitchen in Montclair also was a model of efficiency.
    Actually, the exact opposite was true. Our kitchen, the one Tom used, was a model of inefficiency. Not that there was a handpump over the sink or a spit to roast fowls on, but it was almost that bad.
    Our house had been built when the stress was on spaciousness, and the original owner had planned the kitchen to accommodate three or four servants.
    When Tom baked a cake, or baked what he said was a cake, he had to walk about half a mile.
    The distance from the sink, which was at a backbreaking level, to the old-fashioned gas stove was a good twenty feet. The food was kept in a pantry twenty feet from the stove and forty from the sink. And the dishes were in a butler's pantry, about the same distance away but in the opposite direction.
    The refrigerator was in an alcove by itself. To get to it, you had to detour around a stand holding the bird cage; around a table holding Tom's tools, a plumber's friend, western story magazines, and back copies of The Newark Star-Eagle; and usually around Mr. Chairman, or Fourteen, or both.
    But on the strength of the