"John—are you sure you're not sacrificing your wife to the mills?"
He grew pale in turn, and they looked at each other for a moment without speaking.
"You see it as they do, then?" he rejoined with a discouraged sigh.
"I see it as any old woman would, who had my experiences to look back to."
"Mother!" he exclaimed.
She smiled composedly. "Do you think I mean that as a reproach? That's because men will never understand women—least of all, sons their mothers. No real mother wants to come first; she puts her son's career ahead of everything. But it's different with a wife—and a wife as much in love as Bessy."
Amherst looked away. "I should have thought that was a reason——"
"That would reconcile her to being set aside, to counting only second in your plans?"
"They were her plans when we married!"
"Ah, my dear—!" She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther comment the ineptitude of his argument invited.