After supper Margaret sat and talked with Mrs. Viney. The fisherman's wife was a woman of fifty, with a dragging voice, a faint curiosity in her manner. Her iron-gray hair smoothed flat was tied in a little knot behind. Her husband, a good ten years older, had the vitality of a young man compared with his wife. He was grizzled and squat, with thick red face and powerful shoulders. His eyes twinkled sharply under their fleshy lids; but he exhibited no outward curiosity over the two strangers who had dropped down on his island.
"That woman!" Margaret exclaimed disgustedly to Falkner as they went back to the camp.
"Our excellent hostess? What is the matter with her?"
"She's a whiner!" Margaret replied hotly. "The woman is always the whiner,—it makes me despise my sex. What do you suppose she wants? She has a sister in Lawrence, Mass., and Lawrence, Mass., is her Paris! She wants her husband to give up this, all the life he's known since he was a boy, and go to live in Lawrence, Mass., so that she can walk on brick sidewalks and look into shop windows. There's an ideal for you, my dear!"
Falkner laughed at her outburst. After all an ambition for Lawrence, Mass., was not criminal.
"Oh, women! … She wanted me to know that she had seen life,—knew a lady who had rings like mine,—the social instinct in women,—phew! And he smoked his pipe like an honest man and said not a word. He'll never die in Lawrence, Mass."
"But it must be lonely for the poor thing here winters; their children have all gone to the city."
"There are ten families at the other end of the island, if she must have some one to clack with."
"Perhaps she doesn't find the island society congenial," Falkner suggested slyly. He had heard Margaret inveigh against certain less restricted societies.
"But the old man said, 'Winters are best of all—when it's fierce outside, and there's nothing but yourself to amuse yourself with!' That's the man. And he said: 'I like the blows, too. I've been on the sea all my life, and I don't know nothing about it to speak on.' He has a sense of what it means,—all this greatness about him."