“Oh, nonsense,” said I. “You’re a pessimist. The American woman is all right. Where’d you find her equal for intelligence and charm?” “She may be intelligent,” said he. “She doesn’t use it on anything worth while, except roping in some poor sucker to put up _for_ her and to put up _with_ her. And she may have charm, but not for a man who has cut his matrimonial eye teeth.” I laughed at Van Dyck--that was my grumbling friend’s name. And I soon dropped the subject from my mind. It has never been my habit to waste time in thinking about things when the thinking could not possibly lead anywhere. You may say I ought to have interfered, forced my wife to come to her senses, compelled her to learn her business. Which shows that you know little about the nature of the American woman. If I had taken that course, she would have hated me, she would have done no better, and she would have scorned me as a sordid haggler over small sums of money who was trying to spoil with the vulgarities of commercial life the beauties of the home. No, I instinctively knew enough not to interfere. * * * * * But let us take a long leap forward to the day when I became president of the railroad, having made myself a rich man by judicious gambling with eight thousand dollars loaned me by father Wheatlands. He was a rich man, and in the way to become very rich, and he had no heir but Edna after the drowning of her two brothers under a sailboat in Newark Bay. Margot was in a fashionable school over in New York. My wife and I, still a young couple and she beautiful--my wife and I were as happy as any married couple can be where they let each other alone and the husband gives the wife all the money she wishes and leaves her free to spend it as she pleases. When I told her of my good fortune, and the sudden and large betterment of our finances, she said with a curious lighting of the eyes, a curious strengthening of the chin: “Now--for New York!” “New York?” said I. “What does that mean?” “We are going to live in New York,” replied she. “But we do live in New York. Brooklyn is part of New York.” “Legally I suppose it is,” replied she. “But morally and æsthetically, socially, and in every other civilized way, my dear Godfrey, it is part of the backwoods. I can hardly wait to get away.” “Why, I thought you were happy here!” exclaimed I, marveling, used though I was to her keeping her own counsel strictly about the matters that most interested her. “You’ve certainly acted as if you loved it.” “I didn’t _mind_ it at first,” conceded she. “But for two or three years I have _loathed_ it, and everybody that lives in it.” I was amazed at this last sally. “Oh, come now, Edna,” cried I, “you’ve got lots of friends here--lots and lots of them.”