“You can’t be all wrong about a man. You have thought too much on the subject not to be able to form an opinion. And even if your old maid’s instinct--for you are an old maid, my dear, despite your saying that you are so to prove that you are not--warps your judgment in favour of the man. The pride that is in that man’s features never came out of merely one or two generations of command. It takes a couple of centuries at any rate to put _that_ stamp on a face. He is bold--well we know that from to-day’s work; he is courtly--a man doesn’t do nice things unconsciously, unless it has been his habit. He’s in love with Joy--no doubt about that; and small blame to him for it. He’s in her father’s house, an honoured guest as he should be. He’s sitting next to her and she’s looking straight into his soul with those big lamps of eyes of hers. He saved her life a few hours ago, and now he can see--if he’s not a fool and he’s not that whatever else he may be--that she adores him--and yet he’s not at his ease… What is it? What does it mean? For Joy’s sake I must find that out. I may have to lie a bit; but at least I’ll know what I am doing!” With this object in view she took, when the charm of the meeting began to lose its lustre, the conversation in hand herself. She felt that the time had come. Well she understood when she saw on Colonel Ogilvie’s face the very faintest shade of a shadow of that dark look which in earlier years had meant trouble for some one. “Lucius is thinking!” was the way she put it to herself. To a woman of her bringing up, the acts of the men of the family, and especially of its head, were not within the women’s sphere. In the old slave-owning families there was perpetuated something of the spirit of subordination--some survival of old feudal principle. This was especially so in everything relating to quarrels or fighting. It was not women’s work, and women were trained not to take any part in it, not even to manifest any concern. Indeed the free-spirited Judy having lived so many years in that particular atmosphere, before being able to look round her in wider communities, compared the dominance of view of a man in his own family life to that of a cock who lords it over the farmyard, struts about masterfully, and summons his household round him with no other purpose than his own will. Woman-like she was content to yield herself to the situation. “We’re all the same,” she once said to a farmer’s wife, “women or hens. When the master clucks we come!” As it was quite apparent to her that both her sister and brother-in-law were uneasy, she began to take on herself the responsibility of action, even if it should have to be followed by the odium.