“Thou hed to put thine aside.  A thousand voices called on thee for daily bread.  Thou did not dare to indulge thy private sorrow at the risk of neglecting the work God had given thee to do.  Jane had nothing to interest her.  Her house was so well arranged it hardly needed oversight.  The charities that had occupied her heart and her hands were ended and closed.  In every room in your house, in every avenue of your garden and park Martha had left her image.  Many hours every day you were in a total change of scene and saw a constant variety of men and women.  Jane told me that she saw Martha in every room.  She saw and heard her running up and down stairs.  She saw her at her side, she saw her sleeping and dreaming.  Poor mother!  Poor sorrowful Jane!  It would be hard to be kind enough and patient enough with her.”

“Do you think she will always be in this sad condition?”

“Whatever can thou mean?  God has appointed Time to console all loss and all grief.  Martha will go further and further away as the days wear on and Jane will forget—­we all do—­we all hev to forget.”

“Some die of grief.”

“Not they.  They may induce some disease, to which they are disposed by inordinate and sinful sorrow—­and die of that—­no one dies of grief, or grief would be our most common cause of death.  I think Jane will come out of the Valley of the Shadow a finer and better woman—­she was always of a very superior kind.”

“Mother, you allude to something that troubles me.  I have seen Jane bear and do things lately that a year ago she would have indignantly refused to tolerate.  Is not this a decadence in her superior nature?”

“Thou art speaking too fine for my understanding.  If thou means by ‘decadence’ that Jane is growing worse instead of better, then thou art far wrong—­and if it were that way, I would not wonder if some of the blame—­maybe the main part of it—­isn’t thy fault.  Men don’t understand women.  How can they?”

“Why not?”

“Well, if the Bible is correct, women were made after men.  They were the Almighty’s improvement on his first effort.  There’s very few men that I know—­or have ever known—­that have yet learned to model themselves after the improvement.  It’s easier for them to manifest the old Adam, and so they go on living and dying and living and dying and remain only men and never learn to understand a woman.”

John laughed and asked, “Have you ever known an improved man, mother?”

“Now and then, John, I have come across one.  There was your father, for instance, he knew a woman’s heart as well as he knew a loom or a sample of cotton, and there’s your brother Harry who is just as willing and helpful as his wife Lucy, and I shall not be far wrong, if I say the best improvement I have seen on the original Adam is a man called John Hatton.  He is nearly good enough for any woman.”

Again John laughed as he answered, “Well, dear mother, this is as far as we need to go.  Tell me in plain Yorkshire what you mean by it.”