“Oh, I s’pose you think that’s queer!” She laughed nervously.  “But I just can’t live here any longer!  I was the biggest fool to marry that man!  I thought I was going to have a good home and plenty to eat and to wear.  We do have enough to eat—­and good enough, but, my! he hasn’t bought me anything except one gingham apron since I came, and he growled over that!  He’s the limit for stinginess!  When I was at the Home I used to say I’d rather live in an old kitchen if ’t was mine, and now I’ve got the old kitchen I’d exchange back again in a jiffy!  Do you s’pose she’d take me!”

“Do you mean to—­” hesitated Mrs. Albright.

“Yes, I mean to run away from the old man!  I know you’re shocked; but you haven’t lived with Serono Tenney!  He’ll freeze me out next winter, sure as fate!  I’ll have to shut up the house, except the kitchen, and stay there, where I can’t see even a team pass, with hardly a neighbor in sight.  It drives me wild!  To think I was such a fool!  If he were a poor man, I could stand it; but he’s got money enough.”

“Why don’t you make it fly, then?” broke in Miss Crilly.  “Bet you I would!”

“No, you wouldn’t!  He had to go with me to pick out the apron, and he fretted like sixty because I would buy one made of decent cloth!  I was all in just over that!”

“We s’posed he was a nice, pleasant man—­it’s too bad!” Miss Crilly was the only one who found words for reply.

“I don’t have anything to read,” went on the disappointed woman.  “He doesn’t want to know anything.  He does take a daily newspaper, but that’s all.  There was a Bible in the house when I came, and two or three schoolbooks—­pretty place to live in!”

“Get a divorce!” advised Miss Crilly.

“I could easy!  He’d never fight it—­hasn’t got life enough.  But where could I go?”

“I’m afraid you couldn’t do anything with Miss Sniffen,” said Mrs. Albright sadly.

“What do you say, Polly?” smiled Mrs. Tenney.  “You look as if you had your advice all ready.”

“No,” answered Polly sorrowfully.  “Only you’ve promised, and it doesn’t seem as if you ought to break your promise—­just because you don’t like it here as well as you thought you would.  It isn’t that I’m not sorry, Mrs. Dick—­I mean, Mrs. Tenney—­” Polly hurried to explain.  “I’m so sorry I could cry!  But it doesn’t seem right—­to me—­perhaps it would be, perhaps I don’t know.”  Polly lifted appealing eyes to the woman’s flushed face.

“I guess you see things clearer than I do, child!  We’ll put it to vote.  Mrs. Albright, what do you think?”

“I hardly know, and, anyway, I can’t decide it for you.  I suppose I should incline to Polly’s opinion.”

“Miss Sterling?  You hold the controlling vote, so be careful!” Mrs. Tenney laughed uncertainly.

“It is a hard question, Mrs. Dick.  I can hardly imagine a worse hell than having to live with such a man as you picture him, and yet—­”