mours that his hero was a
"come-outer"; that instead of attending church with Miss Alvira he could
be heard at the barbershop of a Sabbath morning, agreeing with Milo Barrus
that God might have made the world in six days and rested on the seventh;
but he couldn't have made the whale swallow Jonah, because it was against
reason and nature; and, if you found one part of the Bible wasn't so, how
could you tell the rest of it wasn't a lot of grandmother's tales?

Nor did he feel anything but sympathy for a helpless man imposed upon when
he heard Mrs. Squire Cumpston say to Clytie, "Do you know that lazy brute
has her worked to a mere shadow; she just sits in that shop all day long
and lets tears fall every minute or so on her work. She spoiled
five-eighths of a yard of three-inch lavender satin ribbon that way, that
was going on to Mrs. Beasley's second-mourning bonnet. And she's had to
cut him down to twenty-five cents a day for spending-money, and order the
stores not to trust him one cent on her account."

He was sorry to have Miss Alvira crying so much. It must be a sloppy
business, making her hats and things. But what did the woman _expect_ of a
man like Cousin Bill J., anyway?

Yet somehow it came after a few years the new light upon his old idol. One
day he found that he neither resented nor questioned a thing he heard
Clytie herself say about Cousin Bill J.: "Why, he don't know as much as a
goat." Here she reconsidered, with an air of wanting to be entirely
fair:--"Well, not as much as a goat really _ought_ to know!" And when he
overheard old Squire Cumpston saying on the street, a few days later, "Of
all God's mean creatures, the meanest is a male human that can keep his
health on the money a woman earns!" it was no shock, though he knew that
Cousin Bill J. was meant.

Departed then was the glory of his hero, his splendid dimensions shrunk,
his effective lustre dulled, his perfect moustache rusted and scraggly,
his chin weakened, his pale blue eyes seen to be in force like those of a
china doll.

He heard with interest that Squire Cumpston had urged Miss Alvira to
divorce her husband, that she had refused, declaring God had joined her to
Cousin Bill J. and that no man might put them asunder; that marriage had
been raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament and was now
indissoluble--an emblem, indeed, of Christ's union with His Church; and
that, as she had made her bed, so would she lie upon it.

Nor was t