life so. What they're like, and what they do with
their time and strength concerns us enough sight more than
what the tariff is, let me tell you.'

'I admit that what your wife is like concerns you a whole
lot!' The Judge laughed good-naturedly in the face of the
little old bachelor. 'Don't commence jumping on the American
woman so! I won't stand it! She's the noblest of her sex!'

'Do you know why I am bald?' said Dr. Melton, running his hand
over his shining dome.

'If I did, I wouldn't admit it,' the Judge put up a cautious
guard, 'because I foresee that whatever I say will be used as
evidence against me.'

'I've torn out all my hair in desperation at hearing such men
as you claim to admire and respect and wish to advance the
American woman. You don't give enough thought to her--real
thought--from one year's end to another to know whether you
think she has an immortal soul or not!'

Later Lydia's husband insists that they give a dinner.

It was to be a large dinner--large, that is, for Endbury--of
twenty covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for
so many guests. The number of objects necessary for the
conventional setting of a dinner table appalled her. She was
so tired, and her attention was so fixed on the complicated
processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her brain
reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates
and glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal
occasion. They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal
them into order. She discovered that she had put forks for the
soup--that in some inexplicable way at the plate destined for
an important guest there was a large kitchen spoon of iron, a
wild sort of whimsical humor rose in her from the ferment of
utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in, looking very
grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, 'If I tried as hard
for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I've tried all day to have
this dinner right, I'd certainly have a front seat in the
angel choir. If anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it'll
be because he's harder to please than St. Peter himself.'

During the evening:

Lydia seemed to herself to be in an endless bad dream. The
exhausting efforts of the day had reduced her to a sort
of coma of fatigue through which she felt but dully the