Allan bit his lip. "You're about the only person, Beulah, that could say that and get off with whole skin. I suppose he told you I hit him before he was on his feet."
"Well, he didn't. He didn't say you hit him at all, but he couldn't deny it, so we knew the truth. And we knew you must have taken some mean advantage, or you'd never have got near enough to leave a mark on him."
"Jim's quite a hero, all right. It's too bad he's gone."
"It's a good job he's gone," said Harris. "By the way Beulah talks things have gone far enough. I don't want my daughter marrying a farmer."
"Her grandmother's daughter did," said Mary Harris.
"Yes, I know, but things are different now. I look for something better for Beulah."
It was characteristic of Harris, as of thousands of others, that, although a farmer himself, he looked for "something better" for his daughter. He was resigned to Allan being a farmer; his intimate, daily relationship with his son shrank from, any possibility of separation. But for his daughter—no. He had mapped out no career for her; she might marry a doctor, lawyer, merchant, tradesman, even a minister, but not a farmer. It is a peculiarity of the agriculturist that, among all professions, he holds his own in the worst repute. As a class he has educated himself to believe that everybody else makes an easy living off the farmer, and, much as he may revile the present generation for doing so, he is anxious that his children should join in the good picking. In later years has come a gradually broadening conception that farming, after all, calls for brain as well as muscle, and that the man who can wrestle a successful living from Nature has as much right to hold up his head in the world as the experimenter in medicine or the lawyer playing hide-and-seek with Justice through the cracks in the Criminal Code. Herein is a germ of the cityward migration: the farmer himself is looking for "something better" for his children.
"Jim was a good man," persisted his wife. "Don't you think you were—well, perhaps, a little hasty with him?"
Harris sat back. It was his wife's business to agree. For twenty years and more she had been faithful in the discharge of that duty. That she should suggest an opinion out of harmony with his indicated a lack of discipline, not very serious, perhaps, but a seed which, if permitted to flourish, might develop to dangerous proportions.
"So you're goin' to take his part, too? It's a strange thing if I can't handle my hired help without advice from the house."