He straightened up suddenly, and began to march about the room.  Sally, kneeling still over the books, tears drying on her cheeks, watched him.

“Sally,” said the doctor, “God made you and Joe Hawkes and your love for each other.  I don’t know who made the social laws by which women govern these little towns, but I suspect it was the devil.  You’ve been brought up to feel that if you marry a man Mrs. Cy Frost doesn’t ask to her house, you’ll be unhappy ever after.  But I ask you, Sally—­I ask you as a man old enough to be your father—­if you had your home, your husband, your health, your garden, and your children, wouldn’t you be a far happier woman than—­than Lydia say, or Florence Frost, or all the other girls who sit about this town waiting for a man with position enough—­position, Bah!—­to marry?”

Sally’s face was glowing.

“Oh, Dr. Ben, I don’t care anything about position!” she said, all her honest innocence in her face.

“Then why do you act as if you did?” he said, well pleased.

“And would you advise me to marry Joe?” she asked radiantly.

“Joe—­Tom—­Billy, whomever you please!” he answered impatiently.  “But don’t be afraid because he doesn’t wear silk socks, Sally, or smoke a monogrammed cigarette.  Why, my child, that little polish, that little fineness, is the woman’s gift to her man!  These Frosts and Parkers:  it was the coarse strength of their grandfathers that got them across the plains; it was the women who packed the books in the horsehair trunks, that read the Bibles and cleaned and sewed and prayed in the old home way.  You don’t suppose those old miners and grocers, who came later to be the city fathers, ever had as much education as Joe Hawkes, or half as much!”

“I wish my father felt as you do, Doc’ Ben,” Sally said presently, the brightness dying from her face.  “But Pa will never, never—­And even if there were no other reason, why Joe hasn’t a steady job—­”

“That brings me to what I really want to say to you to-day, Sally,” the old man interrupted her briskly.  He opened a desk drawer and took from it a small, old-fashioned photograph.  Sally saw a young woman’s form, disguised under the scallops, ruffles, and pleats of the early seventies, a bright face under a cascade of ringlets, and a little oval bonnet set coquettishly awry.  “D’ye know who that is?” asked Dr. Ben.

“I—­well, yes; I suppose?” murmured Sally sympathetically.

“Yes, it’s my wife,” he answered.  “Mary—­Our boy would be thirty.  They went away together—­poor girl, poor girl!  We wanted a big family, Sally; we hoped for a houseful of children.  And I had her for only fifteen months—­only fifteen months to remember for thirty years!”

Sally was deeply impressed.  She thought it strangely flattering in Dr. Ben to take her into his confidence in this way, and that she would tell Martie about it as they walked home.