"You ought to be proud of that boy, Oliver," he observed, beaming. "There's the making of a fine man in him, but you mustn't let Jinny spoil him. It took all my strength and authority to keep Lucy from ruining Jinny, and I've always said that my brother-in-law Tom Bland would have been a first-rate fellow if it hadn't been for the way his mother raised him. God knows, I like a woman to be wrapped up heart and soul in her household--and I don't suppose anybody ever accused the true Southern lady of lacking in domesticity--but if they have a failing, which I refuse to admit, it is that they are almost too soft-hearted where their children--especially their sons--are concerned." "I used to tell Virginia that she gave in to Harry too much when he was a baby," said Oliver, who was evidently not without convictions regarding the rearing of his offspring; "but she hasn't been nearly so bad about it since Jenny came. Jenny is the one I'm anxious about now. She is a headstrong little beggar and she has learned already how to get around her mother when she wants anything. It's been worse, too," he added, "since we lost the last poor little chap. Ever since then Virginia has been in mortal terror for fear something would happen to the others." "It was hard on her," said the rector. "We men can't understand how women feel about a thing like that, though," he added gently. "I remember when we lost our babies--you know we had three before Virginia came, but none of them lived more than a few hours--that I thought Lucy would die of grief and disappointment. You see they have all the burden and the anxiety of it, and I sometimes think that a child begins to live for a woman a long time before a man ever thinks of it as a human being." "I suppose you're right," returned Oliver in the softened tone which proved to Susan that he was emotionally stirred. "I tried to be as sympathetic with Virginia as I could, but--do you know?--I stopped to ask myself sometimes if I could really understand. It seemed to her so strange that I wasn't knocked all to pieces by the thing--that I could go on writing as if nothing had happened." "I am not sure that it isn't beyond the imagination of a man to enter into a woman's most sacred feeling," remarked the rector, with a touch of the sentimentality in which he religiously shrouded the feminine sex. So ineradicable, indeed, was his belief in the inherent virtue of every woman, that he had several times fallen a helpless victim in the financial traps of conscienceless Delilahs. But since his innocence was as temperamental a quality as was Virginia's maternal passion, experience had taught him nothing, and the fact that he had been deceived in the past threw no shadow of safeguard around his steps in the present. This endearing trait, which made him so successful as a husband, was probably the cause of his unmitigated failure as a reformer. In looking at a woman, it was impossible for him to see anything except perfection.