She sighed: “I’m old! I’m ready to admit it. I’m glad I’m old. I’m never going to try to pretend again! I don’t want ever to be so tired again. If anybody wakes me to-morrow I’ll commit murder. In God’s name, will you never get those stay-laces untied?” RoBards drew out a knife and slashed them and they snapped like violin strings, releasing the crowded flesh. Patty groaned with delight and peeling off her bodice stepped out of the petticoats and kicked them across the floor. She spent a while voluptuously rubbing her galled sides; then lifted her nightgown and let it cascade about her, and fell into bed like a young tree coming down. CHAPTER XXXV The rest of the family might sleep its fill on the morrow, but RoBards had to go to court. Getting himself out of bed was like tearing his own meat from his bones. He could hardly flog his body and mind to the task. If it had not been for the new shower bath the Croton River brought to his rescue, he could never have achieved it. The house looked positively obscene in the morning light, with the wreckage of the festival, and no music or laughter to redeem it. Cuff and Teen were sullen with sleepiness and the prospect of extra toil. They emphasized the fact that the dining-room carpet was too sticky and messy for endurance. RoBards’ breakfast was served on the drawing-room table. He went to court to try a case for a strange old female miser whose counsel he had been for many years. They called her the shrewdest business man in town and she laughed at the fact that she was not considered fit to vote, though the Revolutionary War had been fought because of the crime of “taxation without representation.” “Now that they’ve thrown away the property qualifications, every Tom, Dick, and Harry can vote as often as he’s a mind to. But I can’t. Every thieving politician can load taxes on my property to get money to steal. But I have no say. My husband was a drunkard and a fool and a libertine, and I brought him all the property he ever had. He used it as an excuse for voting and I couldn’t even go to court in my own protection for the law says, ‘Husband and wife are one and the husband is the one.’ “The minute he died, I became a human being again, thank God. But I have to have a man for a lawyer and men to judge my cases. The lamb has to have a wolf for a lawyer and plead before a bench of wolves. But I will say, you’re as honest a wolf as ever I knew.” If anything could have destroyed RoBards’ faith in exclusively white, male suffrage it would have been old Mrs. Roswell. But nothing could shake that tradition, and he accounted her an exception that proved the rule. While he dealt with her professionally as if she were one of the shrewd old merchants of New York, he treated her personally with all the courtesy he displayed for more gentle females, and she was woman enough to love that.