"If you aren't careful, Milly," she warned her granddaughter, "you'll frighten him. You aren't married yet," she added meaningly.
"He oughtn't to buy land without consulting me," Milly flared, forgetting that this transaction had taken place before her determination to become Mrs. Clarence Parker.
"I think you are a very ungrateful girl," Mrs. Ridge observed, with pressed lips.
"Oh, you always take the men's side, grandma!... Clarence isn't the only man in the world."
"Better take care before it's too late," the old lady repeated warningly. "You don't treat Clarence as a girl should who is going to marry. He's an admirable young man."
Mrs. Ridge ever croaked thus, foretelling disaster.
"If you say anything more, I'll never marry him!" Milly flamed in final exasperation. "You don't understand. Women don't behave as they did when you were a girl. They don't lie down before their husbands and let them walk all over them."
"Perhaps not," grandma laughed icily in reply. "But I guess men aren't so different from what they were in my time."
Grandma had her own understanding of male character.