"Well, I know enough now to begin with!"
"Sarah is such a woman—tender, loyal, loving. It needs a woman to know a woman, Mr. Harrington. But she hasn't a particle of practical sense: she can't keep an account straight. She has no idea what economy is—only want or plenty. She is Southern, so Southern! Those people never think what will happen day after to-morrow."
It seemed queer that she should be telling me this kind of thing, which I should be finding out fast enough for myself before long. Perhaps she wanted to see what I would say; at any rate I replied clumsily something about not expecting to make a housekeeper of my wife.
"Yet," she said slowly, studying me, "a woman can do so much to make or mar her husband's career."
"I guess I shan't lay it up against my wife, if I don't pull out a winner."
She laughed at that.
"So you think you are strong enough to win a fight without a woman's help?"
"I've done it so far," I said, thinking a little of May.
"You have made a beginning, a good beginning," she remarked judiciously.
She was reading me like a book of large print, leaning back in her great chair, her eyes half closed, her face in shade except when the firelight flashed.