Mrs. Farnshaw usually denied the most obvious thing if her protective instincts prompted her to do so, but her daughter had hit the bull's-eye so exactly that for the moment she had no defence ready. Elizabeth was encouraged by her mother's silence. Mrs. Farnshaw talked so much that it was not easy to get her attention. The young girl, glowing with the discoveries made in Aunt Susan's home, desired to get at the bottom of the causes of inharmony in her own and to reorganize it on a better basis. It looked as if she was to be granted a hearing upon her schemes. "I don't care about him running over _us_ so much," she said diplomatically, "but you let him run over you in the same way. Now isn't there some way to come at him and get him to see it. When we're alone you talk about him domineering over you, but when he's here you let him say anything he wants to and you never try to help yourself. Why don't you strike out on a new tack and say you won't do it when he makes unreasonable demands? Why don't you reason with him good-naturedly, if you think that's better, without crying, I mean, and then if he won't listen at all----" "I don't know, Lizzie," the mother interposed slowly. "I sometimes think I will an' then when he's here something won't let me. It ain't what he says to you; it's--it's--something he does to you when he looks at you. I'm as weak as water when he looks at me. I don't know why. I guess it's because I've always give up--an'--an'--I can't tell why. A woman does just like a horse--there's more'n one kind of whippin' a man can give--an' she gets scared--an' minds. A man begins right from th' first t' tell her what to do an' she loves 'im and wants t' please 'im, an' before long she don't have her way no more'n a nigger." Some of the truth of the statement came within the grasp of the daughter, who was looking across the idle churn with her mind fixed in singleness of purpose upon remedies, and yet she felt that there was some other element in the matter not yet accounted for. The hopeless tone of the older woman, however, goaded her young spirit into forgetting the caution necessary to dealing with the subject. Her blood fired with resentment that one life should be so crushed by another. It was her mother whose shoulders drooped with a burden too heavy for her to throw off. "If you're sure of that, why don't you leave him? We children are old enough to support ourselves and----" "Lizzie!" Elizabeth had overshot the mark. Her mother was of another generation. "But, ma," the girl protested quickly, "I don't say leave him if you can find any way of settling matters. Can't you have a talk with him--and get him to let you alone if you are willing to do the very best you can? That's the best way. Have you tried it?"