A good memory was undoubtedly one of Ruel Saxon’s strong points, but all recollection of the gentle warning his daughter-in-law had given him was put utterly to flight by this speech of his sister’s. He stiffened himself in his chair, and his nostrils dilated (to use a pet figure of his own) “like a war-horse smelling the battle from afar.”
“Katharine,” he said, “you darken counsel by words without knowledge. I don’t pretend, and nobody ever pretended, that Abigail Sickles or’ to have worked herself to death to keep Abner in college. Her folks or’ to have seen it in time, and stopped her. But you take too much upon yourself when you want to change things round from the way the Lord made ’em. It’s the men that have got to be at the head of things in church and state; it’s the men that have got to go out into the world and earn the living for the women and children; and it’s because they’ve needed the education more, and had more call to use it, that the boys have been sent to college instid of the girls. There’s reason in all things.”
She broke in upon him with a short, scornful laugh. “There’s a terrible good reason sometimes, Ruel, why the women have to earn the living for themselves, ’n’ the children too; and that’s to keep themselves from starving. Who earned the living for Nancy’s children when she brought ’em all home to the old house forty years ago? Well, I guess she ’n’ I earned most of it.”
She lifted her shoulders with an effort, and added: “Shouldn’t be quite so near doubled together now if it hadn’t been for bending over that spinning-wheel day in ’n’ day out, working to get food ’n’ clothes for those children, the six of ’em that John Proctor ran away ’n’ left. You talk about men going out in the world to earn the living. It would be a good thing for the women to go into the world too, sometimes. Mebbe they wouldn’t be quite so helpless then when they’re left to shift for themselves.”
The old man winced. “You had an awful hard time, Katharine, you ’n’ Nancy. John Proctor didn’t do his duty by his family,” he said; and then he faced her with a fresh impatience. “But that ain’t the way the men gener’ly do, is it? To hear you talk a body’d think the women had just naturally got to plan for that sort of thing. You want ’em to go out into the world, like the men, and make a business of it. I’d like to know who’d take care of the home ’n’ the children if they did. Home is the place for women. The Apostle Paul—”
There was a distinct flash of anger now in the small, bright eyes of Miss Katharine Saxon. “Don’t tell me what Paul said,” she exclaimed. “I tell you that notion o’ his, that there was nothing a woman had a right to do but marry, ’n’ have children, ’n’ tend the house, is at the bottom of half the foolishness there is in the world to-day. Women have just as good a right to pick ’n’ choose what they shall do as the men have. And some of ’em had a good deal better do something else than marry the men that want ’em. I tell you Paul didn’t know it all. ’Cording to his own account he had to be struck by lightning before he could see some things, and if another streak had come his way mebbe he’d caught sight of a few more that were worth looking at.”
Ruel Saxon gazed at his sister for a minute speechless. Then he said solemnly, “Katharine, there is such a thing as blasphemy, and I’d be a little careful if I was you how I talked about the Lord’s dealings with his saints.”
He glanced at his granddaughters as he said it, as if to suggest that their morals, if not his own, might be impaired by such language.
“Laws, Ruel,” she said briskly, “I’d somehow got it into my head that that thing happened to him on the way to Damascus, and I didn’t know as you or anybody else called Saul of Tarsus a saint.”
She had him at a moment’s disadvantage, and the thin, high, mocking laugh with which she ended put the finishing touch to his irritation.