"Well," he gasped, "I'll be jiggered! Looks like you can live in the same house with a woman from the time she's born till she's gray-headed and not know her any better than if you'd met her once at a Sunday-school picnic. To think of Persis with all those feelings bottled up inside her for the last twenty years. As the immortal Shakespeare says, "'Who is't can read a woman?'" CHAPTER XVI WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD The morning following the heterogeneous accession to the Dale family, Joel did not leave his bed. Whether his disability was in part or altogether due to a desire to open his sister's eyes to the result of her lack of consideration, Joel himself could not have told, the correct interpretation of one's own motives being the most complex of the sciences. It really seemed to him that he felt very ill and he found a somber satisfaction in reflecting that in the event of his death, Persis would realize her appalling selfishness. "'Twon't come much short of murder," he thought with gloomy relish. Joel's periods of invalidism had been too frequent and prolonged for this sporadic attack to upset the peaceful order of the household. Persis attended to his needs with her usual matter-of-fact kindness, though he suspected that her thoughts were with the new claimants on her interest and found therein fresh fuel for his grievance. Later when he called his sister in the feeble voice of the moribund and learned from Mary that she had gone out to enter the older children in school, he felt himself a much injured man. But this melancholy satisfaction was brief, for Persis was back in half an hour, looking in at his door to ask cheerfully if there was anything he wanted. "Nothing I'm likely to get," replied Joel and turned his face to the wall. Then, too, the house was quiet. Occasionally the baby's fretful voice reached his ears or Celia's bubbling, irrepressible laughter; but the tumult on which he had counted confidently as a factor in his discomfort was lacking. At noon, indeed, the older children came in with a shout, brimful of communications too important to wait, so that the three all talked at once, each voice upraised in a laudable endeavor to drown out the other two. But just as Joel was telling himself that it was intolerable, enough to drive a man out of his seven senses, the announcement of dinner produced an agreeable lull in the uproar. And when the baby was taken upstairs for its nap and Celia cautioned to discretion, the quiet became even more profound. Joel found it necessary to prod his sense of grievance to keep it in action.