After a while the subject of Mela’s hoarse babble and of Christine’s high-pitched, thin, sharp forays of assertion and denial in the field which her sister’s voice seemed to cover, made its way into the old man’s consciousness, and he perceived that they were talking with Mrs. Mandel about it, and that his wife was from time to time offering an irrelevant and mistaken comment.  He agreed with Christine, and silently took her view of the affair some time before he made any sign of having listened.  There had been a time in his life when other things besides his money seemed admirable to him.  He had once respected himself for the hard-headed, practical common sense which first gave him standing among his country neighbors; which made him supervisor, school trustee, justice of the peace, county commissioner, secretary of the Moffitt County Agricultural Society.  In those days he had served the public with disinterested zeal and proud ability; he used to write to the Lake Shore Farmer on agricultural topics; he took part in opposing, through the Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people’s money; on the question of selling a local canal to the railroad company, which killed that fine old State work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass, he might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented himself with defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job.  If he opposed some measures for the general good, like high schools and school libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in his intense individualism, and suspected all expense of being spendthrift.  He believed in good district schools, and he had a fondness, crude but genuine, for some kinds of reading—­history, and forensics of an elementary sort.

With his good head for figures he doubted doctors and despised preachers; he thought lawyers were all rascals, but he respected them for their ability; he was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the intellectual encounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often attended a sitting of the fall term of court, when he went to town, for the pleasure of hearing the speeches.  He was a good citizen, and a good husband.  As a good father, he was rather severe with his children, and used to whip them, especially the gentle Conrad, who somehow crossed him most, till the twins died.  After that he never struck any of them; and from the sight of a blow dealt a horse he turned as if sick.  It was a long time before he lifted himself up from his sorrow, and then the will of the man seemed to have been breached through his affections.  He let the girls do as they pleased—­the twins had been girls; he let them go away to school, and got them a piano.  It was they who made him sell the farm.  If Conrad had only had their spirit he could have made him keep it, he felt; and he resented the want of support he might have found in a less yielding spirit than his son’s.