"If you weren't in such a hurry, Dan, to show what you call your enlightenment (though heaven knows you may be wrong all the time, and a judgment is a perfectly possible thing) you'd have found out that I was only going to say that, if he'd thought more of other people, he'd find other people thinking more about him now." "There I quite agree with you, my dear." Mrs. Baxter looked less grateful than she might have for this endorsement of her views; self-confidence is apt to hold external support in cheap esteem. "When the first Mrs. Greening died," she remarked, "they gave the maids very nice black frocks, with a narrow edging of good crape. The very first Sunday-out that Elizabeth had--the butcher's daughter near the Red Cow--you remember?--she stuck a red ribbon round the neck." The Dean looked puzzled. "Mrs. Greening was the most selfish woman I've ever known," explained Mrs. Baxter; and she added with a pensive smile, "And I've lived in a Cathedral town for thirty years." The red-ribbon became intelligible; it fell into line with Morewood's ill-disciplined wish. Both signified an absence of love, such a departing without being desired as serves for the epitaph of a Jewish king. The Dean cast round for somebody who would prove such an inscription false on Alexander Quisante's tomb. "Anyhow it would break the old aunt's heart," he said. "It'd save her money," observed Mrs. Baxter. "And his wife!" mused the Dean. It was impossible to say whether there were a question in his words or not. But his first instance had not been Quisante's wife; the old aunt offered a surer case. "If you always knew what a man's wife thought about him, you'd know a great deal," said Mrs. Baxter. She possessed in the fullest degree her sex's sense of an ultimate superiority in perception; men knew neither what their wives did nor what they were; wives might not know what their husbands did, but they always knew what they were. It would be rash to differ from a person of her observation and experience; half a dozen examples would at once have confounded the objector.