“Mine, too,” said I, taking high grounds; “but I’m not so sure about Jennie. She’s a woman who has been hard to suit. Nothing else stood in the way of her marrying long ago.”
I looked keenly at Julian, but he evidently knew naught about the one month divorced man with a wife and five children—the youngest two years old. It was the only secret I had ever kept from him, and it burned guiltily at the roots of my tongue. But the woman who reveals to her lord and master some unlovely weakness of her own sex helps him to a judgment-seat too dangerously lofty.
“She’s what you may really call superior,” admitted Julian, “but far enough into the woods to be afraid of the crooked stick. And Uncle Theoph. isn’t so bad.”
“No,” I granted generously: “he doesn’t make me half as miserable as he used to. And I know he won’t mind getting bugs down his neck and stumbling over old logs for yellow and chocolate colored pawpaw leaves and branches of fire-red maple, if Jennie wants him to.”
“I wonder,” Julian ruminated, “if Aunt Marvin ever made him dance around when they were young together and she had a ribbon headdress on her hair, and he choked himself with a stock.”
“No,” said I, “she was his first wife.”
Julian reached over, at the risk of waking T’férgore, and laid his arm across my shoulder.
“Besides, she never cried,” I added. “And a good husband is just like a growing crop: he needs to be rained on.”
Julian uttered a little grunt of contempt, but it was the kind of contempt which magnified the importance of his own sex and therefore did no real harm to ours.
“Uncle Doctor Theophilus is lonely,” said Julian, “having once lived the life of a family man.”