The sheriff nodded. "Naw'm, it ain't yo' way to do things by halves," he echoed thankfully.
After the two men were out of sight, she turned apologetically to John Abner. Although he said little, for he was never a great talker, she had observed that his face wore a look of severe disapprobation.
"There wasn't anything else to do, was there, John Abner?" she asked, in the deferential tone she reserved for a crisis. It was not often that Dorinda deferred, and on the rare occasions when she did so, she was able to administer a more piquant flattery than the naturally clinging woman has at her command.
"It looks to me as if they were letting you down," John Abner rejoined moodily; but his face cleared under her persuasion. After all, what he liked best was to be treated as an authority not only on farming, but on human nature as well. The fact that he had lived as a recluse, and knew nothing whatever of life, did not interfere with the sincerity of his claim to profound wisdom. Men were so immature, she found herself thinking; and they were never so immature as when they strutted most with importance. Since the emotional disaster of her youth, she had been incapable of either loving or hating without a caustic reservation; and she felt that the hidden flaw in her relations with men was her inability to treat a delusion of superiority as if it were a moral principle. This was a small indulgence, she imagined, to a woman who loved passionately; but to one who had safely finished with love and attained the calm judgment of the disillusioned, it was an indulgence which might prove to be particularly irksome.
Slipping her arm through John Abner's, she walked with him into the house. "Well, of course, in a way you're right; but after all, even if they are imposing on us, we couldn't very well refuse to do anything."
Though the two farms would go to John Abner at her death, there were moments when, notwithstanding his affection for her, she suspected uncomfortably that he would like complete authority while she was living. Not that he was ever disagreeable or ungenerous about the way she managed him. He was, she knew, honestly devoted to her, and he admired her without the pity that had always tempered her admiration for him. But he shared, she told herself, with all males who were not milksops, the masculine instinct to domineer over the opposite sex.
"Well, if it's anybody's business, it's James Ellgood's," he protested.
She raised her straight grey eyebrows with a quizzical smile. "All the same you can hardly blame James Ellgood for not making it his business. Nothing will ever let him forget that Jason drove Geneva out of her mind."
"Well, perhaps he did, but there was no law to punish him."
"That's what James Ellgood feels, of course, and I suppose he is right. If it were simply a question of punishment——"