ppling sweetness of tone that seemed to wipe the foulness of
such language from her cheery lips, the story of a shopmate of hers at
home with a broken arm, after a beating from her husband, who had caught
her in flagrant wrong-doing with a friend of his! "I wouldn't call her
much of a woman, I wouldn't!" and the virtuous Roseta pouted the pout of
a virgin who knows all there is to know. "What a disgrace! And she had
four children--four!"

The Rector smiled a ferocious smile. "So she got out of it with a broken
arm, did she! I'd have broken her neck, I would! No half-way business
with these women that don't know what belongs to their husband and what
belongs to the other fellow! Imagine living with a thing like that!
Thank God, I didn't draw one of that kind. I've got a good wife and a
happy home!" "Yes, you can thank God, all right," Roseta assented with
one of her smiles of compassionate contempt. But the Rector was not spry
of wit. And the finer shadings of irony escaped him.

But as the simple-minded sailor walked along, he grew more and more
excited at the outrageous conduct of that woman he didn't know and at
the misfortune of that husband whose name he had never heard. "You know,
a rotten business like that gets under my skin, it does. Here's an
honest man breaking his back from morning till night to feed his woman
and his boys and his girls, and comes home from the shop and finds my
lady flouncing around with Mr. 'Friend'! God, girl! I'd cut the wench's
throat, I would--if I swung for it! If you ask me, I say--well, whose
fault is it? The women! Yes, the women! What was a woman ever put on
this earth for, except to damn a man's soul! _Dios!_ I never saw but two
decent women, anyhow. One is Dolores, and the other is you!" For the
Rector, when he talked so extensively, was inclined to go to extremes,
and he felt this time that his sweeping denunciation needed that much
qualification.

Though much good the concession did him! For his sister was now on
ground where, from the long tirades of _Sina_ Tona, she could be counted
quite expert. She talked passionately, with a tinge of irritation in
her sweet vibrant voice. "Women, eh! Women! Not a bit of it! It's the
men, I say, and I know what I'm talking about. Among the pigs in this
world, the prize hog is the man! See trouble anywhere? Look and you'll
find a man at the bottom of it. Mama says so, too. There are two kinds
of men in this world--scamps and puddingheads!