It had been only an agreeable sort of masterfulness in the courting days. Then it had seemed to the romantic girl that yielding her will to a tender, protecting lover gave to their relation a delightful exclusiveness, as contrasted with other relations. But in three years she had learned that what from one point of view is agreeable authority, becomes from another point of view distasteful restraint. Besides, the fiber of the American woman which yields sweetly to suggestions of warmer wraps and the reserving of dances, is less compliant under complaints of neglected hose or bad management of fuel.
Still, one could conceive of a demeanor that would have deprived even such fault-finding of its sting. But the most tender wifely forbearance will bristle with resentment when such a slight matter as a wrongly folded white tie calls forth allusions to a blissful and ante-marital condition in which hired landladies were attentive to a man's comfort; and above all, when ill-humor allows itself the parting shot from the doorway of a muttered "darned fool."
Mrs. Meeks had watched her stout, well-set-up husband drive away behind his handsome bay horses to his office in town, and then fallen into an unpleasant fit of meditation over her morning task of putting the sitting-room in order.
The suggestion of Cupid's bow had entirely disappeared by the time she had mentally reviewed the whole situation, and her mouth was, as the old black servant secretly observed as she entered, "set for a fight."
"Ef ever Mis' Linda gits her back up onc't, that air Englishman better look out for hisse'f," old Rose had confided to a confidential friend. "I knows the Fitzhugh blood. It won't bear much puttin' upon, now I tells you."
The old family servant was not particularly fond of her Mis' Linda's husband, and she looked forward to that crisis when the Fitzhugh blood would become heated.
"Laws, honey," she made bold to say as she came forward and took the broom into her hard, muscular hands, "you go and set down. You's got no call to worry yo'se'f no-how 'bout housewuk."
"But you have enough to do already, Rose," said Mrs. Meeks kindly, and turning her eyes, in which tears glistened, away from the withered, kindly old face. She dared not meet the look of sympathy, being in that humor when even a dignified woman may be melted into indiscreet confidences under the temptation of a silent, intelligent championship.
Old Rose, however, began to sweep with those deft, smooth strokes that raise no dust, and with her head bent, she talked along in a seemingly purposeless fashion.