“I guess I do--after a fashion,” he said, smiling at her. It was only in love’s fashion, for really he was incapable of quite understanding her. To the country lawyer of sober piety and granite sense of duty, the rich variety of her moods was a continual wonder and sometimes a painful bewilderment. But whether he understood the impetuous inconsequence of her temperament “after a fashion,” or whether he failed entirely to follow the complexity of her thought, he met all her fancies with a sort of tender admiration. People said that Squire Hall was henpecked; they also said that he had married beneath him. His father had been a judge and his grandfather a minister; he himself was a graduate of a fresh-water college, which later, when he published his exegesis on the Prophet Daniel, had conferred its little degree upon him and felt that he was a “distinguished son.” With such a lineage he might have done better, people said, than to marry that girl, who was the most fickle creature and no housekeeper, and whose people--this they told one another in reserved voices--were PLAY-ACTORS! Athalia’s mother, who had been the “play-actor,” had left her children an example of duty--domestic as well as professional duty--faithfully done. As she did not leave anything else, Athalia added nothing to the Hall fortune; but Lewis’s law practice, which was hardly more than conveyancing now and then, was helped out by a sawmill which the Halls had owned for two generations. So, as things were, they were able to live in humdrum prosperity which gave Lewis plenty of time to browse about among his grandfather’s old theological books, and by-and-by to become a very sound Hebrew scholar, and spared Athalia much wholesome occupation which would have been steadying to her eager nature. She was one of those people who express every passing emotion, as a flower expresses each wind that sways it upon its stalk. But with expression the emotion ended. “But she isn’t fickle,” Lewis had defended her once to a privileged relation who had made the accusation, basing it on the fact that Athalia had sewed her fingers off for the Missionary Society one winter and done nothing the next--“Athalia ISN’T fickle,” Lewis explained; “fickle people are insincere. Athalia is perfectly sincere, but she is temporary; that’s all. Anyway, she wants to do something else this winter, and ‘Thalia must have her head.” “Your head’s better than hers, young man,” the venturesome relative insisted. “But it must be her head and not mine, Aunty, when it comes to doing what she thinks is right, even if it’s wrong,” he said, smiling. “Well, tell her she’s a little fool!” cried the old lady, viciously. “You can’t do that with ‘Thalia,” Lewis explained, patiently, “because it would make her unhappy. She takes everything so dreadfully hard; she feels things more than other people do.”