"It's the same with a man with the heartache. You want to go and take it away from him, even if you have to keep it yourself. It don't seem right for him to have it no more than it seems right for him to have to take care of a child.
"That man's got both. The little baby and the heartache. But what can you do for him? There's nothing goin' to cure him but a letter from her, and you can't get that. If ever a man deserved a good wife it's that man, Seth, and what did he get? A Southern woman!"
"Those Southern women make good wives," asserted the Professor, "if you give them plenty of servants and money. None better."
"Good fair-weather wives," nodded the Post Mistress, "but look out for storms. That's when they desert."
"It's a sweeping assertion," mused the Professor, "and not quite fair. It is impossible to judge them all by this weak creature, Celia Lawson. Many a woman in Kentucky braved dangers, cold, hunger and wild animals, living in log huts as these women live in their dugouts, before that State was settled and civilized."
"Some won't give in that it is civilized," objected the Post Mistress, "they're so given down there to killin' people."
"The only difference," went on the Professor, "was in the animals. They had bears. We have buffaloes. But sometimes you come across a woman who isn't cut out for a pioneer woman, and all the training in the world won't make her one. It's the way with Seth's wife."
"She's not only weak and incapable," vowed the Post Mistress, "but soulless and heartless."
"How these women love each other," the Professor commented.
"'Tain't that," flared the Post Mistress. "I'm as good a friend to a woman as another woman can be...."