"Well, I must say. Here we've worked hard, and got a comfortable home, and a fine farm, that pays more every year, and sixteen head of good stock--and you're going to leave it all for a gasoline engine that isn't even built. I don't see what you're thinking of," said poor Mrs. Ford, confronted thus suddenly with the prospect of giving up all her accustomed ways, her old friends, her big house with its stock of linens and its cellar filled with good things.
"You can't begin to make as much in the city as you do here," she argued reasonably. "And suppose the engine doesn't work, after all?"
"It'll work, all right. I'm going to keep at it till it does," Ford said.
Mrs. Ford's opinion was now shared by the whole Greenfield neighborhood as soon as it learned Ford's intention of leaving his fine, paying farm and moving to Detroit to work in a machine shop.
"You had this notion once before, you know, when you were a youngster," his father reminded him. "I thought you'd made up your mind to stay here, where you can make a good living and have some peace and comfort."
He listened to his son's explanation of the possibilities in a self-propelling gasoline engine and he shook his head.
"I guess you can build it if anybody can, but you can't ever tell about these inventions. Looks to me you'd better stick to a good farm, where you're your own boss, and there's always plenty in the cupboard whatever happens, instead of going off to a city job. You may build that contrivance of yours and then again you may not, and look how you'll be living in the meantime."
But Henry was firm, with a determination which is called obstinacy when it goes with failure and great will power when it is coupled with success. He was going to the city. That settled it.
After her first protest Mrs. Ford accepted the situation and set herself with what philosophy she might to packing her linen and wrapping the furniture. She had no great interest in the gasoline engine--machinery in general was to her merely something greasy and whirring, to hold her skirts away from--but if Henry was going to Detroit, of course she was going, too, and she might as well be cheerful about it.
The rosy, teasing country girl who had kept Henry Ford from his beloved machines nearly five years before by her laughing refusal to choose between her suitors, had developed into a cheerful, capable little housewife--the kind of woman whose place is in the home because there she does her best work.