"Well, then, look at the thing sensible. In a place like St. Ange, where there ain't women to spare, you either got to be a decent married woman or you ain't. Long as I've lived in St. Ange, and that's been more'n twenty years, I ain't never yet seen a comfortable, respectable, satisfied, old maid--they ain't permitted here, and you know it. In season, of course, you'd marry--that's to be looked for. It chances to be Jude--and after you get over the strangeness, he'll do as well as any other. They are all powerfully alike when they have their senses. The sameness lies in their having their faculties. The only man as was ever different in St. Ange was Timothy Drake. He got smashed on the head by a falling tree up to Camp 3, and his wits was crushed out of him. But do you know, what was left of Tim was as gentle and decent and perticerlar as you'd want to find in any human. He never drank again, never cussed nor stormed, and I've laid it by as an item, that the badness and sameness of men lies in their wits--if you want a companionable, safe man, you've got to turn to sich as are bereft of their senses--and most women is that foolhardy they prefer wits and diviltry, to senselessness and decency." Joyce smiled feebly at this philosophy. "You are the one to decide," Isa went on. "Now see here, girl, I ain't lived fifty years for nothing. I ain't been in and out of my neighbour's houses, in times when all the closets are open, without learning a heap about things. Men is men and there's no getting around that. So long as you can, you better let them think they amounts to something even when you own to yourself they don't. Private opinions ain't going to bring on trouble; it's only when they ain't private. Now granting that man is what we know he is--it's plain common sense to get as much out of him as you can. Make the place you live in the best thing he's got; and just so long as you can, keep yourself a little bit out of his reach--tantalize him. There ain't nothing so diverting to a man as to claw after a woman, when he's got the belief in himself that when he _wants_ to clutch her, he can. "I know the kind of naked feeling you've got when you sense your power with men first; but that wears off when you get your bearings and find out that it's only a shuffle in the game, anyway. Land of love! if man and woman was _all_, then when they came face to face with life they would get smashed; but housework tempers the matter powerfully; and man's work out among other men; and then when children come and you have to contrive and pinch, why you just plod along and don't ever get flustered. It's just the first dash of cold water in the face, child; after that all lives is pretty much the same." Joyce had grown quieter as Isa's words droned on. It was, for all her commotion, a very humdrum thing that had happened to her.