Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery’s smile broke into an open laugh.  He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next rooms:  ’A boiler factory ain’t in it with woman, lovely woman, is it?’ he put it to his friend.

’Gracious powers!  There’s nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!’ the doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery.  ’I don’t know which makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here and find you thinking they’re funny!’

They are funny!’ insisted the Judge tranquilly.  ’I stood by the door and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch, till I thought I should have a fit.  I never heard anything funnier on the stage.’

‘Looky here, Nat,’ the doctor stared up at him angrily, ’they’re not monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on holidays and then laughed at!  They’re the other half of a whole that we’re half of, and don’t you forget it!  Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to pay for it?  You’d lock up a man as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his 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