“He could step right out into the woods and live with savages,” explained Mrs. Danvers; “and if he wanted a woman he’d knock her down with his club and carry her off to his cave with the best of them.”
Mr. Danvers treated her to an exhibition of open-mouthed astonishment and disapproval. “Melinda, are you crazy to talk of such goings-on?”
“Men don’t do such things nowadays,” she said, soothingly, “but there’s a heap of wild nature in a good many of us. I guess you’d like to turn Fordyce out this very minute.”
“You bet your life I would,” said the fat man, with energy, and without premeditation. “I’d send him flying down that road. He’s too old for Nina. Let her marry one of the boys around here.”
“Do you know what she calls the Rubicon Meadows boys?” asked Mrs. Danvers, dryly.
“No, but I know she don’t mean a third of what she says.”
“Giggling colts, Israel. Colts, just think of it. You see Fordyce has a kind of manner of knowing everything, and he’s out in the world. Then he comes stealing in her life like a mystery, and she likes that. I guess we’ve got to let him have her. We couldn’t stop him, anyway. He’ll tame her and she’ll do him good. I expect he’s mortal blue at times.”
Mr. Danvers relapsed into sullenness, tinged with vindictiveness. He understood his wife well enough to know that the burden of her talk was the duty of resignation. “You’ve always been hard on that girl,” he said, irascibly.
“Hard on her, Israel! Seventeen years I’ve had her, and there isn’t a soul in Rubicon Meadows besides you that guesses she isn’t our own child. How’s that for being hard on her?”
Melinda’s eyes were sparkling. She looked ten years younger than she had before their conversation began, and he abruptly drifted into memories of bygone days. So far back did he go that it was some time before he murmured, absently: “Howsomever, you’ve been well paid for it.”