Now, there is nothing a weak man likes so much as to be considered strong, nothing a henpecked man likes so much as to be regarded a tyrant.  If you ever hear a man boast of his determination to rule his own house, you may feel sure that he is subdued.  And a henpecked husband always makes a great show of opposing everything that looks toward the enlargement of the work or privileges of women.  Such a man insists on the shadow of authority because he can not have the substance.  It is a great satisfaction to him that his wife can never be president, and that she can not make speeches in prayer-meeting.  While he retains these badges of superiority, he is still in some sense head of the family.

So when Mrs. Anderson loyally reminded her husband that she had always let him have his own way, he believed her because he wanted to, though he could not just at the moment recall the particular instances.  And knowing that he must yield, he rather liked to yield as an act of sovereign grace to the poor oppressed wife who begged it.

“Well, if you insist on it, of course, I will not refuse you,” he said; “and perhaps you are right.”  He had yielded in this way almost every day of his married life, and in this way he yielded to the demand that August should he discharged.  But he agreed with his wife that Julia should not know anything about it, and that there must be no leave-taking allowed.

The very next day Julia sat sewing on the long porch in front of the house.  Cynthy Ann was getting dinner in the kitchen at the other end of the hall, and Mrs. Anderson was busy in her usual battle with dirt.  She kept the house clean, because it gratified her combativeness and her domineering disposition to have the house clean in spite of the ever-encroaching dirt.  And so she scrubbed and scolded, and scolded and scrubbed, the scrubbing and scolding agreeing in time and rhythm.  The scolding was the vocal music, the scrubbing an accompaniment.  The concordant discord was perfect.  Just at the moment I speak of there was a lull in her scolding.  The symphonious scrubbing went on as usual.  Julia, wishing to divert the next thunder-storm from herself, erected what she imagined might prove a conversational lightning-rod, by asking a question on a topic foreign to the theme of the last march her mother had played and sung so sweetly with brush and voice.

“Mother, what makes Uncle Andrew so queer?”

“I don’t know.  He was always queer.”  This was spoken in a staccato, snapping-turtle way.  But when one has lived all one’s life with a snapping-turtle, one doesn’t mind.  Julia did not mind.  She was curious to know what was the matter with her uncle, Andrew Anderson.  So she said: 

“I’ve heard that some false woman treated him cruelly; is that so?”

Julia did not see how red her mother’s face was, for she was not regarding her.

“Who told you that?” Julia was so used to hearing her mother speak in an excited way that she hardly noticed the strange tremor in this question.