It certainly is inspiring to be told you are an inspiration.... Mr. Thomas Dilworth did not blush when he learned that mentally he was the most stimulating person that Miss Hayes had ever met; but he had an agreeable consciousness of his superiority, which he made no effort to conceal from his wife. He never made any effort to conceal anything from Milly, not even that fondness for female society which Mrs. Drayton had deplored. And by-and-by Milly's tears began to lie very near the surface. They never gathered and fell, but perhaps they dropped one by one on her heart, leaving their imprint of patiently accepted pain. At this time she thought of her own mental deficiencies very constantly. Her mind had no flexibility, and she reached conclusions only by toilsome processes; but once reached, they were apt to be permanent. Her slow reasoning at this time led her to conclude that her Thomas was not to blame because he admired some one who was cleverer than she. "Why, he'd be foolish not to," she thought, sadly. But this eminently reasonable conclusion did not save Mrs. Dilworth from turning white and red with misery, when, for instance, her husband observed that he had had to take down two bars of the Gordon fence, so that Miss Hayes could go home across lots. Then Thomas chuckled, and added that Helen Hayes was the brightest woman he knew. He did not go on to tell of his walk in the October dusk, and Miss Helen's arch appeal to him for instruction on a certain political point on which she was ignorant. Thomas had instructed her so fully and volubly, while she looked at him with her reverent gaze, that it had grown dark; and that was why he had to take her home across lots. Thomas had not mentioned these details; he merely said he thought Miss Helen Hayes a bright woman--the brightest, to be exact, that he knew. And yet his Milly went into the kitchen pantry and hid her face in the roller behind the door and sobbed. Well, of course! It's very absurd. A fat, wordless woman, who ought to be darning her children's stockings, it's very absurd for her to be weeping into a roller because her man, who has loved her for forty-three years, eleven months, twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours, and forty minutes--her man, to whom she is as absolutely necessary as his old slippers or his shabby old easy-chair--because this man does not think her the brightest woman he knows. But absurd as it is, it is suffering.