“But you don't mean—”
“I don't know what I do mean,” said Rose, nervously. “Yes, I do know what I mean. I always know what I mean, but I don't know what men mean making me drop candy I have had given me, and trampling on it, and men don't know that I know what I mean.” Rose was almost crying.
“Go up-stairs and lay down a little while before dinner,” said Sylvia, anxiously.
“No,” replied Rose; “I am going to help you. Don't, please, think I am crying because I feel badly. It is because I am angry. I am going to set the table.”
But Rose did not set the table. She forgot all about it when she had entered the south room and found Henry Whitman sitting there with the Sunday paper. She sat down opposite and looked at him with her clear, blue, childlike eyes. She had come to call him Uncle Henry.
“Uncle Henry?” said she, interrogatively, and waited.
Henry looked across at her and smiled with the somewhat abashed tenderness which he always felt for this girl, whose environment had been so very different from his and his wife's. “Well?” he said.
“Uncle Henry, do you think a man can tell another man's reasons for doing a queer thing better than a woman can?”
“Perhaps.”
“I almost know a woman could tell why a woman did a queer thing, better than a man could,” said Rose, reflectively. She hesitated a little.