ane told
me that she saw Martha in every room. She saw and heard her running up
and down stairs. She saw her at her side, she saw her sleeping and
dreaming. Poor mother! Poor sorrowful Jane! It would be hard to be kind
enough and patient enough with her."

"Do you think she will always be in this sad condition?"

"Whatever can thou mean? God has appointed Time to console all loss and
all grief. Martha will go further and further away as the days wear on
and Jane will forget--we all do--we all _hev_ to forget."

"Some die of grief."

"Not they. They may induce some disease, to which they are disposed by
inordinate and sinful sorrow--and die of that--no one dies of grief, or
grief would be our most common cause of death. I think Jane will come
out of the Valley of the Shadow a finer and better woman--she was always
of a very superior kind."

"Mother, you allude to something that troubles me. I have seen Jane bear
and do things lately that a year ago she would have indignantly refused
to tolerate. Is not this a decadence in her superior nature?"

"Thou art speaking too fine for my understanding. If thou means by
'decadence' that Jane is growing worse instead of better, then thou art
far wrong--and if it were that way, I would not wonder if some of the
blame--maybe the main part of it--isn't thy fault. Men don't understand
women. How can they?"

"Why not?"

"Well, if the Bible is correct, women were made after men. They were the
Almighty's improvement on his first effort. There's very few men that I
know--or have ever known--that have yet learned to model themselves
after the improvement. It's easier for them to manifest the old Adam,
and so they go on living and dying and living and dying and remain only
men and never learn to understand a woman."

John laughed and asked, "Have you ever known an improved man, mother?"

"Now and then, John, I have come across one. There was your father, for
instance, he knew a woman's heart as well as he knew a loom or a sample
of cotton, and there's your brother Harry who is just as willing and
helpful as his wife Lucy, and I shall not be far wrong, if I say the
best improvement I have seen on the original Adam is a man called John
Hatton. He is nearly good enough for any woman."

Again John laughed as he answered, "Well, dear mother, this is as far as
we need to go. Tell me in plain Yorkshire what you mean by it."

"I mean, John, that in your heart you are hardly judging Jan