“What are you going to do, Frederick?” And she laughs one of them mean kind of laughs, and looks at Henry like she wanted him to spunk up a little more, and says: “What can you do, Frederick?”
Frederick, he says, not excited a bit:
“There's quite a number of things I could do that would look bad when they got into the newspapers. But it's none of them, unless one of you forces it on to me.” Then he says:
“You did want to see the children, Jane?”
She nodded.
“Jane,” he says, “can't you see I'm the better man?”
The perfessor, he was woke up after all them years of scientifics, and he didn't want to see her go. “Look at him,” he says, pointing to the feller with the brown beard, “he's scared stiff right now.”
Which I would of been scared myself if I'd a-been ketched that-a-way like Henry was, and the perfessor's voice sounding like you was chopping ice every time he spoke. I seen the perfessor didn't want to have no blood on the carpet without he had to have it, but I seen he was making up his mind about something, too. Jane, she says:
“You a better man? You? You think you've been a model husband just because you've never beaten me, don't you?”
“No,” says the perfessor, “I've been a blamed fool all right. I've been a worse fool, maybe, than if I had beaten you.” Then he turns to Henry and he says: