"You mean it's more than that?"
"Well, isn't it?" She had learned that she could always win him to her point of view by disguising a naked fact in the paraphernalia of philosophy. "From our side, I suppose it's one of humanity." Though she despised sophistry as heartily as she despised indirectness, she could bend both to her purpose when it was a matter of compulsion.
"If you mean that our humanity is more important than his punishment?" he returned in a mollified tone.
"Yes, I do mean that. You have said it so often yourself." That would finish his opposition, she knew, and without his opposition, life on the farm would be easier for the next two or three weeks.
"Won't it make a lot of trouble?" he inquired.
She frowned. "I'm afraid it will. Of course, if he gets better, he can move over to Five Oaks, and anyway the authorities ought to make some kind of provision for him. We can't be expected to take over the poor farm." Her tone was suddenly bitter with memory; but she concluded hastily: "In the meantime, I'll warm the spare room and get it ready. If the doctor says he must have fresh air, we can move his bed out on the back porch."
John Abner looked resentful. "I'm sorry for the poor devil, of course, even if he did drive his wife crazy; but I don't see the sense in turning the place upside down for somebody who hasn't the slightest claim on you. He isn't even a poor relation."
"He isn't anybody's poor relation, that's the trouble."
"I'm not so sure." John Abner could be brutally candid at times. "There are a lot of Idabella's mulatto children still hanging about Five Oaks."
She shivered with disgust. "What the law doesn't acknowledge, I suppose it doesn't bother about."