So modest a request could hardly be denied. So the neighbor helped to restore Dave to the tolerance if not the good graces of his wife. On the way to his unsuspecting family, Dave was apologetically garrulous, explaining how he had been working some distance away and could not very well leave his job. As he rambled on making an evident attempt to excuse himself, his companion’s patience became exhausted and he turned to Dave with the logical question to be asked by any honorable citizen.
“Dave,” said he, “that’s all very well that you have been telling me, but what I want to know is, how you could sneak off the way you did and leave your family?”
Dave hesitated and then proceeded to pass out an excuse that probably caused more local feminine indignation than the actual sin of abandonment had ever done in all the surrounding region.
“I guess it was a kind of mean trick,” said Dave. “That morning I went off I had no real notion of going. But you see after I had got up, got dressed, and started the fire, I happened to look in the bedroom where my wife was lying asleep, hair all frowzy, mouth wide open, and snoring so you could hear her out in the road.”
Dave hesitated.
“Do you know,” said he, “she looked so awful homely I just felt as if I couldn’t stand it any longer.”
It is probable that having variously contributed to supplying the needs of the abandoned family for an entire year, the indignant women before mentioned were careful not to express their views in the hearing of Dave’s wife. At any rate the historian mentions no further gaps in the family happiness. So it may be assumed that the couple lived in perfect accord thereafter.
And now, having brought this episode to a delightful ending, it is the more to be regretted that another rupture of conjugal domesticity had a very different conclusion. In this case it was the beloved wife who wandered from home and fireside.