From her covert in the elder-bushes Mrs. Anderson had seen the parley, and her cheeks had also grown hot, but from a very different emotion.  She had not heard the words.  She had seen the loitering girl and the loitering plowboy, and she went back to the house vowing that she’d “teach Jule Anderson how to spend her time talking to a Dutchman.”  And yet the more she thought of it, the more she was satisfied that it wasn’t best to “make a fuss” just yet.  She might hasten what she wanted to prevent.  For though Julia was obedient and mild in word, she was none the less a little stubborn, and in a matter of this sort might take the bit in her teeth.

And so Mrs. Anderson had recourse, as usual, to her husband.  She knew she could browbeat him.  She demanded that August Wehle should be paid off and discharged.  And when Anderson had hesitated, because he feared he could not get another so good a hand, and for other reasons, she burst out into the declaration: 

“I don’t believe that you’d care a cent if she did marry a Dutchman!  She might as well as to marry some white folks I know.”

CHAPTER II.

An explosion.

It was settled that August was to be quietly discharged at the end of his month, which was Saturday night.  Neither he nor Julia must suspect any opposition to their attachment, nor any discovery of it, indeed.  This was settled by Mrs. Anderson.  She usually settled things.  First, she settled upon the course to be pursued.  Then she settled her husband.  He always made a show of resistance.  His dignity required a show of resistance.  But it was only a show.  He always meant to surrender in the end.  Whenever his wife ceased her fire of small-arms and herself hung out the flag of truce, he instantly capitulated.  As in every other dispute, so in this one about the discharge of the “miserable, impudent Dutchman,” Mrs. Anderson attacked her husband at all his weak points, and she had learned by heart a catalogue of his weak points.  Then, when he was sufficiently galled to be entirely miserable; when she had expressed her regret that she hadn’t married somebody with some heart, and that she had ever left her father’s house, for her father was always good to her; and when she had sufficiently reminded him of the lover she had given up for him, and of how much he had loved her, and how miserable she had made him by loving Samuel Anderson—­when she had conducted the quarrel through all the preliminary stages, she always carried her point in the end by a coup de partie somewhat in this fashion: 

“That’s just the way!  Always the way with you men!  I suppose I must give up to you as usual.  You’ve lorded it over me from the start.  I can’t even have the management of my own daughter.  But I do think that after I’ve let you have your way in so many things, you might turn off that fellow.  You might let me have my way in one little thing, and you would if you cared for me.  You know how liable I am to die at any moment of heart-disease, and yet you will prolong this excitement in this way.”