He nodded, but Nannie took no offense. He was thinking. “That's our trouble. I'm above Lillie.”
“And I must try to reach him somehow.”
“If Lillie would do that——” he began, but Nannie cut him short.
“It's not Lillie, it's you! Lillie is above you!”
Again he caught his breath, this time with a gasp, but he was forced to be silent. It would be a strange man indeed who could enter into an argument to prove his wife inferior to himself. He might be thoroughly convinced of this; might even have taken it for granted that others realized the fact, but he could hardly have the face to bring his voluminous arguments on this point to the attention of an outsider.
“I know what you're thinking,” said Nannie, and she looked uncanny again. “I can't say these things as well as some people could, but you think because you know books you're better than Lillie. The books can't be the first things, because there must always be men before there can be books; and there must always be some real things, true things, before there can be men. These were there first. The books don't make them, but just refer to them, and the people that have the real things are higher than the books. That's what makes Lillie higher than you.”
The man sat thinking for a few moments, then he tried to laugh.
“Really, Nannie,” he said, “if one were ill with that horrid disease called Conceit, a quiet half hour with you on the deck of a boat would restore him to health.”
Nannie gazed at him defiantly, but said nothing.
“No, I'll tell you, little one, how it all came about,” he said rather patronizingly. “Lillie and I married when we were boy and girl. She was seventeen and I was twenty. Lillie was very pretty and that attracted me, and I—well, I don't know just what she saw in me!”