She and Aunt Augusta have organized an Equality League, and that wheel came very near flying loose and being the finish of Uncle Peter.

He came to see me the morning of the first meeting and, when I saw him coming up the front walk, I got an astral vision of the chips on his shoulder enlarged to twice their natural size, and called to Jasper to mix the juleps very long and extra deep.  But deep as they were, to the very top of the longest glasses, he couldn’t drown his wrath in his.

“Women, women,” he exploded from over the very mint sprig itself, “all fools, all fools from the beginning of time; made that way on purpose—­on purpose—­hey?  World needs some sort of creature with no better sense than to want to spend their lives fooling with babies and the bread of life.  Human young and religion are the only things in the world men can’t attend to for themselves and that’s what they need women for.  Women with no brains—­but all heart—­all heart—­hey?”

“Why should just a little brain hurt their heart-action.  Uncle Peter?” I asked mildly.  There is nothing in the world that I ever met that I enjoy any more than one of Uncle Peter’s rages, and I always try to be meekly inflammatory.

“They’re never satisfied with using them to run church societies and children’s internal organs, but they want to use ’em on men and civilization in general.  Where’d you get that Yankee school-marm—­hey?  Why don’t she get a husband and a baby and settle down?  Ten babies, twenty babies if necessary—­hey?”

“You are entirely mistaken as to the plans that Jane and Aunt Augusta have for the League they are forming this morning, Uncle Peter.”  I began to say with delight as to what was likely to ensue.  “If you would only listen to Jane while she—­”

“Don’t want to hear a word she has to say!  All ’as the crackling of thorns under a pot’—­all the talk of fools.”

“But surely you are not afraid to listen to her, Uncle Peter,” I dared to say, and then stood away.

“Afraid, afraid—­never was afraid of anybody in my life, Augusta not excepted!” he exclaimed, as he rose in his wrath.  “The men of this town will show the uprising hussies what we think of ’em, and put ’em back to the heels of men, where they belong—­belong—­hey?”

And before I could remonstrate with him he was marching down the street like a whole regiment out on a charge that was to be one of extermination, or complete surrender.

The Crag told me that evening that the Mayor’s office of Glendale had reeked of brimstone, for hours, and the next Sunday Aunt Augusta sat in their pew at church, militantly alone, while he occupied a seat in the farthest limits of the amen corner, with equal militancy.

But Uncle Peter’s attitude during the time of Jane’s campaign for general Equality in Glendale was pathetically like that of an old log, that has been drifting comfortably down the stream of life with the tide that bore its comrades, and suddenly got its end stuck in the mud so that it was forced to stem alone the very tide it had been floating on.