"Not a mistake of the wise, however. For my part I've lived long enough to see that jealousy, look at it all round, is the feeblest and silliest vice we humans suffer from. There's nothing to it but wretchedness and wasted energy. Jealous I never could be of any living creature, I assure you."
But though Joe despised jealousy, such was his humour, that within an hour, for the sake of personal amusement he sought to awake the futile flame in another breast.
Melinda Honeysett was waiting at Falcon Farm when the men returned, but she had come to see Lawrence Maynard, not Mr. Stockman. He, however, entertained her while his man was looking after the sheep. Indeed, he insisted on Melinda joining him in a cup of tea. He had not seen her since his return from Brixham, and now the rogue in Joe twinkled to the top and he began to enumerate the rare qualities of Miss King. He knew that Melinda regarded herself as holding a sort of proprietary right over him, and he much enjoyed this shadowy bondage and often pretended to groan under it. But now he launched on the task of making Melinda jealous for his private entertainment. With Soosie-Toosie the enterprise had failed. She humbly accepted the accomplishments of Ann King and praised her genius so heartily that Joe soon dropped the subject; but for Melinda it came as a new idea, and this enthusiasm on Mr. Stockman's part for a paragon at once unknown and eligible, caused Mrs. Honeysett just that measure of exasperation her first male friend desired to awaken.
"My!" said Melinda, after listening to the glowing story of the farmer's daughter, her virtues, her resource, her financial ability and her practical knowledge of affairs; "I didn't know there were any angels to Brixham. Do she fly about, or only walk, like us common women?"
"No, she walks," said Joe, delighted at his instant success; "but even in walking she never wastes a footstep, like most of us. Never wastes anything, and yet not close. Just a grasp of all that matters and a large scorn for all that don't. And as to being an angel, Melinda, you may say she is that—just in the same sense that you and Soosie-Toosie and all nice women are angels. Only that. She's a thorough human woman and, simply judged as a woman, a very fine piece indeed."
Mrs. Honeysett laughed somewhat harshly.
"Don't you drag me and Susan in. I'm sure he needn't do that, need he, Soosie? Such poor creatures as us—not worthy to hold a candle to this here Jane King."
"Ann King," corrected Joe.
"You and me will go and take lessons, and ax her to teach us how to look after our poor fathers," said Melinda to Miss Stockman. "We're such a pair of feckless, know-naught fools that it's time we set about larning how a parent did ought to be treated. And, by the same token, I must get back to mine. He's bad and getting worse. I only came to see Maynard, because father wants to have a tell with him—to-night if possible. Poor father's going down hill fast now—all, no doubt, because I've not understood how to nurse him and tend him and live my life for him alone. If he'd only had Ann King to look after him, I dare say he'd be well again by now."
Joe, greatly daring, pushed the joke a little deeper.