As for the head of the family, who spent only Saturdays and Sundays with his family, he seemed to find congenial society in the head of the house,--a fact which at first gave his wife great uneasiness and annoyance. “Edgar,” Mrs. Tramlay would say, “you know Mr. Hayn is only a common farmer.” “He’s respectable, and thoroughly understands his own business,” the husband replied,--“two reasons, either of which is good enough to make me like a man, unless he happens to be disagreeable. ‘Common farmer’! Why, I’m only a common iron-merchant, my dear.” “That’s different,” protested Mrs. Tramlay. “Is it? Well, don’t try to explain how, little woman: ’twill be sure to give you a three days’ headache.” So Tramlay continued to devote hours to chat with his host, pressing high-priced cigars on him, and sharing the farmer’s pipes and tobacco in return. He found that Hayn, like any other farmer with brains, had done some hard thinking in the thousands of days when his hands were employed at common work, and that his views of affairs in general, outside of the iron trade, were at least as sound as Tramlay’s own, or those of any one whom Tramlay knew in the city. The one irreconcilable member of the family was the elder daughter, Lucia. She was the oldest child, so she had her own way; she was pretty, so she had always been petted; she was twenty, so she knew everything that she thought worth knowing. She had long before reconstructed the world (in her own mind) just as it should be, from the stand-point that it ought to exist solely for her benefit. Not bad-tempered, on the contrary, cheerful and full of high spirits, she was nevertheless in perpetual protest against everything that was not exactly as she would have it, and not all the manners that careful breeding could impart could restrain the unconscious insolence peculiar to young and self-satisfied natures. She would laugh loudly at table at Mrs. Hayn’s way of serving an omelet, tell Mrs. Hayn’s husband that his Sunday coat looked “so funny,” express her mind freely, before the whole household, at the horrid way in which the half-grown Hayn boys wore their hair, and had no hesitation in telling Philip Hayn, two years her senior, that when he came in from the field in his brown flannel shirt and gray felt hat he looked like an utter guy. But the Hayns were human, and, between pity and admiration, humanity long ago resolved to endure anything from a girl--if she is pretty.