“Poor, poor child,” said Pussy, cuddling Jane and the baby together against her sympathetic bosom.  “Something must be done, Cousin Fanny.  Something must be done, as Mr. Wrenn said on the way down, if it’s only for the satisfaction of letting Charley know what we think of him.”

“We’ve got to put down our pride and take some step,” declared Jimmy, wondering vaguely how he could have forgotten the spirited utterance his wife attributed to him.  “I’m all for the authority of the husband, of course, and the sanctity of the home, and everything according to the Bible and all that—­but, bless my soul, there’s got to be a limit to what a woman is expected to stand.  There’re some things, and I know Uncle Meriweather will agree with me, that it isn’t in human nature to put up with.”

“If I were forty years younger I’d call him out and give him a whipping he wouldn’t forget in a jiffy,” blustered Uncle Meriweather, feebly violent.  “There’s no way of defending a lady in these Godforsaken days.  Why, I remember when I was a boy, my poor father—­God bless him!—­you recollect him, don’t you Fanny?—­never used a walking stick in his life and could read print without glasses at ninety—­”

“Making love to the dressmaker,” pursued Jimmy, whose righteous anger refused to be turned aside from its end.

“Don’t you think, Cousin Fanny,” whispered Pussy, “that Gabriella had better leave the room?”

“Gabriella?  Why, how on earth can we spare her?” Mrs. Carr whispered back rather nervously.  Then, beneath Pussy’s compelling glance, she added timidly:  “Hadn’t you better go, darling, and see what the children are doing?”

“They are playing in the laundry,” replied Gabriella reassuringly.  “I told Dolly not to let them go out of her sight.”

“She knows so much already for her age,” murmured Mrs. Carr apologetically to Pussy.

“I don’t know what Mr. Wrenn will think of your staying, dear,” said Pussy, smiling archly at the girl.  “Mr. Wrenn, I was just saying that I didn’t know what you would think of Gabriella’s staying in the room.”

Jimmy’s large handsome face, with its look of perpetual innocence—­the incorruptible innocence of a man who has never imagined anything—­turned helplessly in the direction of his wife.  All things relating to propriety came, he felt instinctively, within the natural sphere of woman, and to be forced, on the spur of the moment, to decide a delicate question of manners, awoke in him the dismay of one who sees his accustomed prop of authority beginning to crumble.  Surely Pussy knew best about things like that!  He would as soon have thought of interfering with her housekeeping as of instructing her in the details of ladylike conduct.  And, indeed, he had not observed that Gabriella was in the room until his wife, for her own purpose, had adroitly presented the fact to his notice.

“Gabriella in the room?” he repeated in perplexity.  “Why, you’d better go, hadn’t you, Gabriella?  Oughtn’t she to go, Pussy?”