“I don’t see why I should,” returned Henry.  “I don’t see why anybody but a fool should ever open the book, to begin with.”

“What is the book?”

Henry looked at the title-page.  “It is Whatever, by Mrs. Fane Raymond,” he said, absently.

“I’ve heard it was a beautiful book.”

“Most women would like it,” said Henry.  “It seems to be a lot written about a fool woman that didn’t know what she wanted, by another fool woman who didn’t know, either, and was born cross-eyed as to right and wrong.”

“Why, Henry Whitman, it ain’t true!”

“I suppose it ain’t.”

“No book is true—­that is, no story.”

“If it ain’t true, so much the less reason to tell such a pack of stupid lies,” said Henry.  He closed the book with a snap.

“Why, Henry, ain’t you going to finish it?”

“No, I ain’t.  I’m going back to the shop to work.”

“Henry Whitman, you ain’t!”

“Yes, I am.  As for pottering round here, and trying to get up an interest in things I ought to have begun instead of ended in, and setting round reading books that I can’t keep my mind on, and if I do, just get madder and madder, I won’t.  I’m going back to work with my hands the way I’ve been working the last forty years, and then I guess I’ll get my mind out of leading-strings.”

“Henry Whitman, be you crazy?”

“No, but I shall be if I set round this way much longer.”

“You don’t need to do a mite of work.”

“You don’t suppose it’s the money I’m thinking about!  It’s the work.”

“What will folks say?”

“I don’t care what they say.”

“Henry Whitman, I thought I knew you, but I declare it seems as if I have never known you at all,” Sylvia said.  She looked at him with her puzzled, troubled eyes, in which tears were gathering.  She was still very pale.

A sudden pity for her came over Henry.  After all, he ought to try to make his position clear to her.  “Sylvia,” he said, “what do you think you would do, after all these years of housekeeping, if you had to stand in a shoe-shop, from morning till night, at a bench cutting leather?”

Sylvia stared at him.  “Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Why, you know I couldn’t do it, Henry Whitman!”

“Well, no more can I stand such a change in my life.  I can’t go to farming and setting around after forty years in a shoe-shop, any more than you can work in a shoe-shop after forty years of housekeeping.”

“It ain’t the same thing at all,” said Sylvia.

“Why not?”

“Because it ain’t.”  Sylvia closed her thin lips conclusively.  This, to her mind, was reasoning which completely blocked all argument.

Henry looked at her hopelessly.  “I didn’t suppose you would understand,” he said.

“I don’t see why you thought so,” said Sylvia.  “I guess I have a mind capable of understanding as much as a man.  There is no earthly sense in your going to work in the shop again, with all our money.  What would folks say, and why do you want to do it?”