"Saving your presence, that I don't. I believe in fathers, and so I always call that blessed man your father. Will you believe it, Missis, he wouldn't let me reach up to take the globes off to clean them, nor lift the five-gallon water-bottle when it came in full from the grocer. He treats my white hairs as if they were his mother's--God love him!" I listened to Mary with a dubious mind, divided between admiration of the Angel and the intention of telling him not to help her too much, for fear, after the manner of her kind, she should discover a delicacy of constitution which would prevent her from lifting the water-bottle even when it was empty. "And I'll tell you what I've been doing on the quiet for him to show him that I'm not ungrateful. You know his white waistcoats have been done up at the laundry so scandalous that I'd not have the face to be taking your money if I were that laundryman, so I've just done them myself, and would you take a look at them before I carry one back for him to put on?" I took a look, and they were of that faultless order of work that makes you think the millennium has come. I took one back to where the Angel stood before the mirror wrestling in a speaking silence with his tie. I had not been married long, but I had already learned that there are some moments in a man's life which are not for speech. He smiled at me in the glass to let me know that he recognized my presence, and would attend to me later. When the tie was made, I drew a long breath. "The country is saved once more!" I sighed. He laughed. I mean he smiled. Not once a month does he laugh, and always then at something which I don't think in the least funny. As he took the waistcoat from my hand his face lighted up. "Now that is something like!" he said. "I tell you it pays to complain once in awhile. I wrote that laundry a scorcher about these waistcoats." "It does pay," I said. Then I explained. "Do you know what I think?" he said. "I think we've got a regular old cast-iron angel in Mary." "Oh, rap on wood," I cried, frantically reaching out with both hands. "Do you want her to spill soup down your neck tonight?" "I didn't think," he said, apologetically, groping for wood. "_Now_, do I dare speak?" "Yes, go on. What do you think of her?"