“It isn’t possible,” she thought.  “It isn’t possible that he can get so mad and be so dreadful.  Maybe if I can make him think he’s awful good and kind”—­oh, simple subtlety—­“believe he is, too, and he’ll stop getting such spells.  Oh, if he would always be just like this!”

But it was only two days later when she called him to help her; there was a hen that was possessed to brood, and Aunt Dolcey had declared that it was too late, that summer chickens never thrived.

“I can’t get her out, Wes,” said Annie.  “She’s ’way in under the stable, and she pecks at me so mean.  You got longer arms’n me—­you reach in and grab her.”

He came, smiling.  He reached in and grabbed, and the incensed biddy pecked viciously.

In a flash his anger was on him.  He snatched again, and this time brought out the creature and dropped her with wrung neck, a mass of quivering feathers and horribly jerking feet, before Annie.

“I reckon that’ll learn the old crow!” he snarled, and strode away.

“We might’s well have soup for supper,” remarked Aunt Dolcey, coming on the scene a moment later.  “Dere, chile, what’s a chicken, anyway?”

“It’s not that,” said Annie briefly; “but he makes me afraid of him.  If I get too afraid of him I’ll stop caring anything about him.  I don’t want to do that.”

“Den,” answered Aunt Dolcey with equal brevity, “you got think up some manner er means to dribe his debbil out.  Like I done tol’ you.”

“Yes, but——­”

Aunt Dolcey paused, holding the carcass of the chicken in her hands, and faced her.

“Dishyer ain’ nuthin’.  Wait tell he gits one his still spells, whenas he doan’ speak ter nobody an’ doan’ do no work.  Why ain’ we got no seed potaters?  Marse Wes he took a contrairy spell an’ he wouldn’t dig ‘em, an’ he wouldn’t let Zenas tech ’em needer.  Me, I went out moonlight nights an’ dug some to eat an’ hid ’em in de cellar.  Miss Annie, you doan’ know nuffin’ erbout de Dean temper yit.”

They went silently to the house.  Aunt Dolcey stopped in the kitchen and Annie went on into the living room.  There on the walls hung the pictures of Wes’s father and mother, cabinet photographs framed square in light wood.  Annie looked at those pictured faces in accusing inquiry.  Why had they bequeathed Wes such a legacy?  In his father’s face, despite the beard that was the fashion of those days, there was the same unmistakable pride and passion of Wes to-day.  And his mother was a meek woman who could not live and endure the Dean temper.  Well, Annie was not going to be meek.  She thought with satisfaction of Aunt Dolcey and the hot flatiron.  The fact that he had never lifted finger to Aunt Dolcey again proved that if one person could thus conquer him, so might another.  Was she, his wife, to be less resourceful, less self-respecting than that old Negro woman?  Was she to endure what Aunt Dolcey would not?

Suddenly she snatched out the little old family album from its place in the top of the desk secretary, an old-fashioned affair bound in shabby brown leather with two gilt clasps.  Here were more pictures of the Dean line—­his grandfather, more bearded than his father, his Dean vein even more prominent; his grandmother, another meek woman.