He loved to stand and watch her. She reminded him of a picture he had once seen--one of a series of four depicting the seasons; and Jean resembled the one called "Autumn," a figure of a woman in a purple Grecian robe walking through a wood of falling leaves, a mature woman, with kindliness and wisdom in her eyes, and a certain proud grace to her. Jean often looked like that. She thought, too, in a simple way. Her opinions were definite as rocks. "It's no' right, Aleck!" She would raise her brown eyes calmly and fearlessly to him, discussing a manner of trading or a phase of municipal politics. She had only one fault to find with him. She would pat his head and say: "There 's only one thing about you, Aleck, you 're not exactly human. There 's a wee thing missing somewhere, red fellow. They workers of yours, they 're no more in your eye than the machinery they handle. I 'd like to have you a wee bit softer, Aleck. I would so." "I 'm soft enough toward you," he would object. "It's no' the same thing, mannie. You 're soft toward me because I 'm close to you. But outside that you 're hard. You don't see people. You must n't think with the head, Aleck. You must think a wee bit wi' the heart. Na, na! Toward every one, I mean." He often regretted, in his club at night, after leaving her, that she was not the sort of person he could marry. It would be so pleasant to have a house with her in it, the fine big woman, with the wise head and the warm heart, with the temperament rich as wine. She would go well in a house of her own, fitting in it naturally, as some fine old clock would, or some mellow furniture of long ago. And to be greeted by her in the evening-- "It would be queer and pleasant," he thought in his stilted Belfast idiom. "Och, ay! It would that!" But she was not the manner of woman the Robertsons married. His dead fathers would turn in their graves were he to pick a wife from out the mill-hands. The august and chaste and cold assembly of the Robertson wives had no room in it for anything as warm and handsome and as plebeian as Jean. The wives the Robertsons chose were of their own rank, meager spinsters with a little money, with the accomplishments of gentlewomen, the playing of certain tunes on the piano, the knitting of afghans, the speaking of a prim English instead of Belfast Scots--an acidulous gentility. Ay! If it hadn't been so! The interview with the foreman had been stormy. It became furious. It had ended disastrously, so disastrously he did n't care a tinker's curse. "I ha'e gi'en you two raises a'ready, and here you 're back for more. Be damned to it, men, is it the king's mint you take me for?" "Ay, you ha' gi'en us the raises, Mister Aleck, but the rents ha' raised again. There 's no place to flit to tha' 's cheaper. The price o' food is unchristian--" "Is that my fault?" "Na! Na! It's no' your fault. It's just the times. And there 's childer comin'--" "Is that my fault?"