et used to it."

"Maybe 'twould help your eye-sight if you was the one getting
poisoned," Joel returned sarcastically in the querulous tones of the
confirmed invalid. "I've 'suffered the pangs of three several deaths,'
as Shakespeare says, because you left the door part way open the last
time you went to the 'cyclopedia." For twenty years Joel had been an
omnivorous reader, and his speech bristled with quotations gathered
from his favorite volumes, and generally tagged with the author's name.
The quotations were not always apt, but they helped to confirm the
village of Clematis in the conviction that Joel Dale was an
intellectual man.

By the time Persis had groped her way to the bed, she was sufficiently
accustomed to the dim light to be able to distinguish her brother's
restless eyes gleaming feverishly in the pallid blur of his face.
"What do you want now, Joel?" she asked, with the mechanical gentleness
of overtaxed patience.

"Persis, there's a text o' Scripture that's weighing on my mind. I
can't exactly place it, and I've got to know the context before I can
figure out its meaning. 'Be not righteous over-much, neither make
thyself over-wise. Why shouldst thou destroy thyself?' That's the way
it runs, as near as I can remember. Now if righteousness is a good
thing and wisdom too, why on earth--"

"Goodness, Joel! I don't believe that's anywhere in the Bible. Sounds
more like one of those old heathens you're so fond of reading. And
anyway," continued Persis firmly, frustrating her brother's evident
intention to argue the point. "I can't look it up now. Mis' West's
down-stairs."

"Come to discuss the weighty question o' clothes, I s'pose. 'Bonnets
and ornaments of the legs, wimples and mantles and stomachers,' as the
prophet says. And that's of more importance than to satisfy the
cravings of a troubled mind. If the world was given up to the tender
mercies o' women, there'd be no more inventions except some new kind of
crimping pin, and nothing would be written but fashion notes."

"I'll have to go now, Joel." Persis Dale, having supported her
brother from the time she was a girl of seventeen, had enjoyed ample
opportunity to become familiar with his opinion of her sex. As the
manly qualities had declined in Joel, his masculine arrogance had waxed
strong. The sex instinct had become concentrated in a sense of
superiority so overwhelming that the woman was not born whom Joel would
not have