“I don’t know how I could ever have done it; I must have been downright crazy. I didn’t care much for Joe when I married him--he wasn’t exactly handsome, and girls think such a lot of that. But he just laid down and worshipped me, and I _was_ getting fond of him in a way; only the life was so dull. I’d been used to a big city--I come from Detroit--and Hinksville is such a poky little place; that’s where we lived; Joe is telegraph-operator on the railroad there. He’d have been in a much bigger place now, if he hadn’t--well, after all, he behaved perfectly splendidly about _that_. “I really was getting fond of him, and I believe I should have realized in time how good and noble and unselfish he was, if his mother hadn’t been always sitting there and everlastingly telling me so. We learned in school about the Athenians hating some man who was always called just, and that’s the way I felt about Joe. Whenever I did anything that wasn’t quite right his mother would say how differently Joe would have done it. And she was forever telling me that Joe didn’t approve of this and that and the other. When we were alone he approved of everything, but when his mother was round he’d sit quiet and let her say he didn’t. I knew he’d let me have my way afterwards, but somehow that didn’t prevent my getting mad at the time. “And then the evenings were so long, with Joe away, and Mrs. Glenn (that’s his mother) sitting there like an image knitting socks for the heathen. The only caller we ever had was the Baptist minister, and he never took any more notice of me than if I’d been a piece of furniture. I believe he was afraid to before Mrs. Glenn.” She paused breathlessly, and the tears in her eyes were now of anger. “Well?” said Woburn gently. “Well--then Arthur Hackett came along; he was travelling for a big publishing firm in Philadelphia. He was awfully handsome and as clever and sarcastic as anything. He used to lend me lots of novels and magazines, and tell me all about society life in New York. All the girls were after him, and Alice Sprague, whose father is the richest man in Hinksville, fell desperately in love with him and carried on like a fool; but he wouldn’t take any notice of her. He never looked at anybody but me.” Her face lit up with a reminiscent smile, and then clouded again. “I hate him now,” she exclaimed, with a change of tone that startled Woburn. “I’d like to kill him--but he’s killed me instead.