She laughed, a hard little sound, and a dull flush went up to the Governor’s hair.
“You might, for a fact, though, my girl,” he persisted, half sullenly. “There’s lots of women with straight-laced ideas that I wouldn’t trust half so quick. Unlace their ideas a little and they’d go to the devil so quick you’d never catch ’em. The lacing’s all that holds them.”
Mrs. Hallard made no reply; her companion sat regarding her, but seeing, instead of the woman before him, the quick, handsome girl of a dozen years earlier. Old “Soaker” Lally’s daughter had been in her teens when first he knew her, handsome as they made ’em, he thought, now, remembering. And he had been a young fool—and worse—but not wholly a villain; not that.
“I—I’d have made things right, Kate, if you hadn’t sent me off,” he said, lamely, speaking out of old memories.
“Yes,” the woman flashed, “an’ we’d a’ had a nice little hell all to ourselves, after.”
The man demurred.
“Yes we would!” she went on, “I know. First place, Dave—I didn’t sense it then, but I have since—we didn’t neither of us really care. We was only hot-blooded young fools that thought we did.... Anyhow: it’s sleepin’ dogs now,” she added, conclusively. “Best let ’em lie. You done more ’n most men would, I’ll say that much, when you wanted to marry me—but I saved you that, anyhow,” with another laugh; “I’d a’ looked sweet, wouldn’t I? tryin’ to make good as Governor’s lady?”
“You’d make good at anything you undertook, Kate,” Marden insisted, sturdily.
“Maybe so: but thank my stars I know, yet, when I ain’t got the hand to stack up on. What a man wants in a wife, Dave, is a woman ’t can chaperon his daughter when he gits one.”
Mrs. Hallard hesitated a moment, her voice softening. “I never had no watchin’ over, myself,” she said, “I wouldn’t a’ stood fer’t from the old man, an’ my mother died when I was a kid; but a girl needs it: an’ it takes the right sort o’ woman to give it.”