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“Would you like me to try, sir?” Mary called.

“What’s the use?” said my father. “You’ll only spoil your clothes. And, besides, the boat’s old and rotten. She’s not worth two dollars for kindling wood. I rather hope she does blow away, so as to provide me with a much-needed excuse to buy a better one. The oars, I see, are in her. Never mind, they’re too heavy. I never liked them.”

Then he put his arm around Ellen.

“By the way, Teenchy,” said he, “your old boot is still sticking out of the oak tree.”

“Oh, papa,” cried Ellen, “you said we mustn’t talk about it–or it would be full of spiders.”

“I said you mustn’t talk about it,” said he. “So don’t. Anyhow”–and he included Mary in his playful smile–“it’s still there–so make the most of that.”

He turned to go into the house, and then:

“Oh, by the way, Mary,” said he, “you have not asked for your wages recently, and I think you are owed for three months. If you will come to the study in a little while I will give them to you.” He was always somewhat quizzical. “Would you rather have cash or a check?”

Personally I didn’t know the difference, and, at the time, I admired Mary exceedingly for being able to make a choice. She chose cash.

But till some years later I thought she must have repented this decision, for not long after she went into a kind of mild hysterics, and cried a good deal, and said something about “such kindness–this–side Heaven.” And was heard to make certain comparisons between the thoughtfulness and pitifulness of a certain commuter and the Christ.

But these recollections are a little vague in my head as to actual number of tears shed, cries uttered and words spoken. But I do know for an incontestable fact that during the night, just as my father had prophesied, our rowboat was blown loose by the northeast gale, and has not been seen from that day to this. And I know that when I woke up in the morning and called to Mary she was not in her bed, and I found in mine, under the pillow, a ridiculous old-fashioned brooch, that I had ever loved to play with, and that had been Mary’s mother’s.

My father was very angry about Mary’s going.

“Good Lord!” he said; “we can’t pretend to conceal it!” But then he looked out over Pelham Bay, and it had swollen and waxed wrathful during the night, and was as a small ocean–with great waves and billows that came roaring over docks and sea-walls. And then his temper abated and he said: “Of course she would–any woman would–sense or no sense.”

And, indeed, the more I know of women, which is to say, and I thank God for it, the less I know of them, the convinceder am I that my father was right.

In other words, if a woman’s man has nine chances in ten of drowning by himself she will go with him so as to make it ten chances, and a certainty of her being there whatever happens. And so, naturally, man cannot tolerate the thought of woman getting the right, based on intelligence, to vote.

IV

Twenty-five years later I paid Mary and Braddish a pleasant Saturday-to-Monday visit in what foreign country it is not necessary to state. The tiny Skinnertown house of their earlier ambition, with its little yard, had now been succeeded by a great, roomy, rambling habitation, surrounded by thousands of acres sprinkled with flocks of fat, grazing sheep. It was a grand, rolling upland of a country that they had fled to; cool, summer weather all the year round, and no mosquitoes. Hospitable smoke curled from a dozen chimneys; shepherds galloped up on wiry horses and away again; scarlet passion-vines poured over roofs and verandas like cataracts of glory; and there was incessant laughter and chatter of children at play.