she tried to argue with him he enlarged on it, nursing his sense of injury, like the Indians. She could go back home and live like a lady again. "Clean napkins every meal and extra on Sundays." He knew she was getting tired of him. What was he, anyhow? He was a cripple; a child could knock him down and tramp on him. And she would starve anyhow, if she stayed; if he didn't get hay somewhere he was through. Done. Wiped out.
She had to soothe him like a child that night.
Perhaps their occasional quarrels might have been forgotten, but there was something else, more fundamental. There was a complete difference in their point of view. One night, her nerves on edge, she asked him to roll a cigarette for her.
"Not on your life," he told her grimly.
"But why not? I used to smoke cigarettes. You know that."
"My wife doesn't."
She was surprised and indignant.
"That's ridiculous," she told him. "It's—medieval."
"Sounds bad!" he drawled imperturbably. "Maybe I'm kinda old-fashioned, girl, but the women out here don't smoke, and you don't want to get talked about."
"You may ask me not to smoke. You can't forbid it."
"Since when?"
She made a curious little gesture of helplessness.
She lay awake a long time that night, thinking. She had been bred in the new school; even, in their own way, her father and mother subscribed to it. This school taught that the wife was no longer subordinate to the husband; that marriage was a mutual contract, in which each bore his part. Obedience was even being left out of the marriage service. The old medieval idea of the wife being a chattel, a
How strange that such an idea should still persist out here! Not in the towns perhaps, but in the back country. Mrs. Mallory, for instance. She would have held it, or at least never disputed it. But she had been happy with Jake, apparently. Perhaps the issue never came up; she had never wanted to do anything of which he disapproved.
