Banner_. But from the very first he
ostentatiously left Molly, his wife, at home. "The place for a woman,"
said Brownwell to the assembled company on the Barclay veranda one
evening, when Jane had asked him why he did not take Molly to the
opening of the new hotel at Garden City, "the place for woman is in
the sacred precincts of home, 'far from the madding crowd's ignoble
throng.' The madame and I," with a flourish of his cane, "came to that
agreement early, eh, my dear, eh?" he asked, poking her masterfully
with his cane. And Molly Brownwell, wistful-eyed and fading, smiled
and assented, and the incident passed as dozens of other incidents
passed in the Ridge, which made the women wish they had Adrian
Brownwell, to handle for just one day. But the angels in that
department of heaven where the marriages are made are exceedingly
careful not to give to that particular kind of women the Adrian
Brownwell kind of men, so the experiment which every one on earth for
thousands of years has longed to witness, still remains a theory, and
Adrian Brownwell traipsed up and down the earth, in his lavender
gloves, his long coat and mouse-coloured trousers, his high hat, with
his twirling cane, and the everlasting red carnation in his
buttonhole. His absence made it necessary for Molly Brownwell to leave
the sacred precincts of the home many and many a Saturday afternoon,
to go over the books at the _Banner_ office, make out bills, take them
out, and collect the money due upon them and pay off the printers who
got out the paper. But Adrian Brownwell ostentatiously ignored such
services and kept up the fiction about the sacred precincts, and often
wrote scorching editorials about the "encroachment of women" and grew
indignant editorially at the growth of sentiment for woman's suffrage.
On one occasion he left on the copy-hook a fervid appeal for women to
repulse the commercialism which "was sullying the fair rose of
womanhood," and taking "from woman the rare perfume of her chiefest
charm," and then he went away on a ten days' journey, and the foreman
of the _Banner_ had to ask Mrs. Brownwell to collect enough money from
the sheriff and a delinquent livery-stable keeper to pay the freight
charges on the paper stock needed for that week's issue of the paper.

The town came to know these things, and so when Brownwell, who, since
his marriage, had taken up his abode at the Culpeppers', hinted at his
"extravagant family," the town refused