caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips
as if she were going to faint and said grandly: "Mr. Cutter, you have
broken all the Commandments--spare the finger-bowls!"

They quarreled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they went
to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to the town
at large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful
husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in a disguised
handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the mutilated journal in
the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping into the space from
which it had been cut. Those two could quarrel all morning about whether
he ought to put on his heavy or his light underwear, and all evening about
whether he had taken cold or not.

The Cutters had major as well as minor subjects for dispute. The chief of
these was the question of inheritance: Mrs. Cutter told her husband it was
plainly his fault they had no children. He insisted that Mrs. Cutter had
purposely remained childless, with the determination to outlive him and to
share his property with her "people," whom he detested. To this she would
reply that unless he changed his mode of life, she would certainly outlive
him. After listening to her insinuations about his physical soundness,
Cutter would resume his dumb-bell practice for a month, or rise daily at
the hour when his wife most liked to sleep, dress noisily, and drive out
to the track with his trotting-horse.

Once when they had quarreled about household expenses, Mrs. Cutter put on
her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for painted
china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her "to live by her brush."
Cutter was n't shamed as she had expected; he was delighted!

Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half-buried the
house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped of the
"privacy" which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his
opportunity, surely; but he never cut down the trees. The Cutters seemed
to find their relations to each other interesting and stimulating, and
certainly the rest of us found them so. Wick Cutter was different from any
other rascal I have ever known, but I have found Mrs. Cutters all over the
world; sometimes founding new religions, sometimes being forcibly
fed--easily recognizable, even when superficially tamed.

XII

AFTER Antonia w