“Oh, hush, Henrietta!” cried Maria, appealingly, as Dr. Grey came back and sat himself placidly down at the breakfast-table, with his big book beside him.  He had apparently not heard a single word.

Yet he looked so good and sweet—­yes, sweet is the only fitting word; a gentle simplicity like a child’s, which always seemed to hover round this bookish learned man—­that the womenkind were silenced—­as, by a most fortunate instinct, women generally are in presence of their masculine relatives.  They may quarrel enough among themselves, but they seem to feel that men either will not understand it or not endure it.  That terrible habit of “talking over” by which most women “nurse their wrath and keep it warm,” is happily to men almost impossible.

Breakfast was never a lively meal at the Lodge.  After the first few days Dr. Grey took refuge in his big book, which for years Miss Gascoigne averred he had always kept beside him at meal-times.  Not good behavior in a paterfamilias, but the habit told its own tale.  Very soon Christian neither marveled at nor blamed him.

Never in all her life, not even during the few months that she lived with the Fergusons, had she sat at a family table; yet she had always had a favorite ideal of what a family table ought to be—­bright, cheerful, a sort of domestic altar, before which every one cast down his or her offering, great or small, of pleasantness and peace; where for at least a brief space in the day all annoyances were laid aside, all stormy tempers hushed, all quarrels healed; everyone being glad and content to sit down at the same board, and eat the same bread and salt, making it, whether it were a fatted calf or a dinner of herbs, equally a joyful, almost sacramental meal.

This was her ideal, poor girl!  Now she wondered as she had done many times since her coming “home,” if all family tables were like this one—­shadowed over with gloomy looks, frozen by silence, or broken by sharp speeches, which darted about like little arrows pointed with poison, or buzzed here and there like angry wasps, settling and stinging unawares, and making every one uncomfortable, not knowing who might be the next victim stung.  True, there was but one person to sting, for Miss Grey never said ill-natured things; but then she said ill-advised and mal-apropos things, and she had such an air of frightened dumbness, such a sad, deprecatory look, that she was sometimes quite as trying as Miss Gascoigne, who spoke out.  And oh, how she did speak!  Christian, who had never known many women, and had never lived constantly with any, now for the first time learned what was meant by “a woman’s tongue.”