"And even the resourceful Sidney--being a woman--can't drive a nail," remarked the doctor, deliberately.
He knew how well worn the truism was, but he used it designedly, as a toreador uses his scarf. He liked to see his wife flare up. Her kind eyes grew so bright and her wholesome cheeks so red, and it was always so delightfully easy to get her in a good humor again. It is a tendency which is very common in large men with amiable little wives like Mrs. Alexander, and one which is very uncommon in smaller men with wives of a different disposition.
Lynn Gordon, as an unmarried man, naturally knew nothing of these matters and blundered on, disappointing the doctor's confident expectations by asking the lady a question, which turned her attention in another direction. He inquired who Sidney was, seeing an opportunity for learning something about the girl behind the silver poplars.
There was no subject upon which Mrs. Alexander was more willing to talk, nor one upon which she could talk more eloquently, and she accordingly began at once to give Lynn the history of Sidney Wendall, whom she held to be a most interesting as well as a most admirable and remarkable character. It was no easy or simple thing, so the doctor's wife said, for a woman of the Pennyroyal Region to earn a family's living. In that country no white woman could work outside her own home (were there anything for her to do) on account of coming into competition with black laborers. And Sidney had received no training to lift her above the laboring class, having had even less than the average country education. And yet, as the doctor's wife pointed out, she had managed to maintain her family and herself in reasonable comfort and universal respect. It was all very well for the men to laugh at Sidney and make fun of her news and her gossip. It was all very well for them to say--as the doctor said, according to his wife, who flashed her eyes at him--that Sidney made her news out of the whole cloth when she did not get it over the grapevine telegraph. Everybody knew how hard men always were on any woman who was not pretty. As though poor Sidney could help the length of her own nose! Let the mean men make fun as much as they pleased! The indignant lady would like, so she said, to see one of them who had done his duty in the world more nobly than Sidney had done hers. She would also like, so she declared, to see one of them who kept as strict guard over what he said about his neighbors, and who was as free from evil-speaking and mischief-making, as Sidney was--for all her talking that they were always so ready to ridicule.