“Your awn brother, I think, ought to be in your estimation far——”
“Dick is far below her in every way, and Dick knows it. I think, mother dear, it is a good sign for Dick’s future, to find him choosing for a wife a woman who will help him to become nobler and better every year of his life.”
“I hev brought up my son to a noble standard. Dick is now too good, or at least good enough, for any woman that iver lived. I don’t care who, or what she was, or is. I want no woman to improve Dick. Dick hes no fault but the one of liking women below him, and inferior to him, and unworthy of him:—women, indeed, that he will hev to educate in ivery way, up to his own standard. That fault comes his father’s way exactly—his father likes to feel free and easy with women, and he can’t do it with the women of his awn rank—for tha knaws well, the women of ivery station in life are a good bit above and beyond the men, and so——”
“Dear mammy, do you think?—oh, you know you cannot think, father married with that idea in his mind. You were his equal by birth, and yet I have never seen father give up a point, even to you, that he didn’t want to give up. I think father holds his awn side with everyone, and holds it well. And if man or woman said anything different, I would not envy them the words they would get from you.”
“Well, of course, I could only expect that you would stand by Dick in any infatuation he had; the way girls and young men spoil their lives, and ruin their prospects, by foolish, unfortunate marriage is a miracle that hes confounded their elders iver since their creation. Adam fell that way. Poor Adam!”
“But, mammy dear, according to your belief, the woman in any class is always superior to the man.”
“There was no society, and no social class in that time, and you know varry well what came of Adam’s obedience to the woman. She must hev been weaker than her husband. Satan niver thought it worth his while to try his schemes with Adam.”
“I wonder if Adam scolded and ill-treated Eve for her foolishness!”
“He ought to have done so. He ought to hev scolded her well and hard, all her life long.”
“Then, of course, John Tetley, who killed his wife with his persistent brutality, did quite right; for his excuse was that she coaxed him to buy railway shares that proved actual ruin to him.”