"Oh, no, my clear husband will be at home; he knew that I was going to invite you. I never do anything without his consent."
"Humph!" grunted Nancy; "that's what I call slavery. I take it a wife's not like a red Indian, tied to a stake."
"No," replied Persis, smiling; "rather like a vine fastened to a supporting, sheltering wall."
"I'm none of your creepers!" cried Nancy, with a saucy toss of the head. "I'm a standard for the matter of that, and don't want to lean upon nobody;" and certainly she did not look like anything that needs a prop, with those stout, strong arms, bared to the elbows, and a red face which might once have been handsome, but which now looked only coarse. "I suppose," continued Mrs. Sands, "that you're one of them meek ones as have old-fashioned notions about wedlock and its duties."
"Very old ones," replied Persis, gently swaying herself to and fro, to rock to slumber the soft little burden so tenderly folded in her arms; "as old, or more so, as the days of Abraham and Sarah."
"I'm one as sticks up for woman's rights," said Nancy, and she drew herself up proudly.
"So am I," observed Persis, looking down on her babe; "but I see them in a different light, perhaps, from what you do. I fancy that it is the husband's right to support, the wife's to lean; the husband's to guide, the wife's to obey; both to honor, to cherish, and to love; at least, it's so with my Ned and me."
Nancy glanced at the happy wife and mother before her, and though she might not choose to imitate, she could neither pity nor despise. She only said, however, "There's no doubt but that wedlock's a yoke to most. If I'd been fastened to one who chose to pull hard one way, why I'd just have dragged the harder the t'other way, and—"
"And I am afraid that then no great progress would have been made either way," said Persis, timidly yet playfully.