THE FACT WAS
Saying is one thing and doing is another. In Montana a railway bridge had been destroyed by fire, and it was necessary to replace it. The bridge engineer and his staff were ordered in haste to the place. Two days later came the superintendent of the division. Alighting from his private car, he encountered the old master bridge-builder.
"Bill," said the superintendent—and the words quivered with energy—"I want this job rushed. Every hour's delay costs the company money. Have you got the engineer's plans for the new bridge?"
"I don't know," said the bridge-builder, "whether the engineer has the picture drawed yet or not, but the bridge is up and the trains is passin' over it."
THE LAST WORD, AS USUAL
The ways of a woman are supposed to be past finding out, but after all there are times when her logic is irresistible as in the case of a certain wife who had spent her husband's money, had compromised him more than once, had neglected her children and her household duties, and had done everything that woman can do to make his life a failure.
And then, as they were both confronted by the miserable end of it all, and realized that there was no way out of it, he said:
"Perhaps I ought not to appear to be too trivially curious, but I confess to a desire to know why you have done all this. You must have known, if you kept on, just what the end would be. Of course, nobody expects a woman to use her reason. But didn't you have, even in a dim way, some idea of what you were doing?"
She gazed at him with her usual defiance, a habit not to be broken even by the inevitable.
"Certainly I did. It was your fault."