“She don’t treat him any worse than he does her,” observed Mason, just to the core.  “Seems to me, if I was single, and a girl as pretty as Jo—­”

“Well, I’m glad Ford has got spunk enough not to care,” Mrs. Kate interposed hastily.  “Phenie’s pretty, of course—­but it takes more than that to attract a man like Ford.  You can’t expect him to like her when she won’t look at him, hardly; it makes me feel terribly, because he’s sure to think it’s because he—­I’ve tried to make her see that it isn’t right to condemn a man because he has made one mistake.  He ought to be encouraged, instead of being made to feel that he is a—­an outcast, practically.  And—­”

“Jo don’t like Ford, because she’s stuck on Dick,” stated a shrill, positive young voice behind them, and Mrs. Kate turned sharply upon her offspring.  “They was waving hands to each other just now, through the window.  I seen ’em,” Buddy finished complacently.  “Dick was down fixing the bridge, and—­”

“Buddy, you run right out and play!  You must not listen to older people and try to talk about some-thing you don’t understand.”

“Aw, I understand them two being stuck on each other,” Buddy maintained loftily.  “And I seen Dick—­”

“Chase yourself outdoors, like your mother said; and don’t butt in on—­”

“Chester!” reproved Mrs. Kate, waving Buddy out of the kitchen.  “How can you expect the child to learn good English, when you talk to him like that?  Run along, Buddy, and play like a good boy.”  She gave him a little cake to accelerate his departure and to turn his mind from further argument, and after he was gone she swung the discussion to Buddy and his growing tendency toward grappling with problems beyond his seven years.  Also, she pointed out the necessity for choosing one’s language carefully in his presence.

Mason, therefore, finished wiping the dishes almost in silence, and left the house as soon as he was through, with the feeling that women were not by nature intended to be really companionable.  He had, for instance, been struck with the humorous side of Ford and Josephine’s perfectly ridiculous antipathy, and had lingered in the kitchen because of a half-conscious impulse to enjoy the joke with some one.  And Mrs. Kate had not taken the view-point which appealed to him, but had been self-consciously virtuous in her determination to lend Ford a helping hand, and resentful because Josephine failed to feel also the urge of uplifting mankind.

Mason, poor man, was vaguely nettled; he did not see that Ford needed any settlement-worker encouragement.  If he was let alone, and his moral regeneration forgotten, and he himself treated just like any other man, Mason felt that Ford would thereby have all the encouragement he needed.  Ford was once more plainly content with life, and was taking it in twenty-four-hour doses again; healthful doses, these, and different in every respect from those days spent in the sordid round of