oh, don't
misunderstand me! She never told me she was glad she lost it, but how in
God's name could she be otherwise? She couldn't do all he required of her
without it. She had butter to make, and shellers to cook for, and then the
damned fool 'd shove that heavy baby on her--and he actually talked to me
about her being cross!"

Hugh Noland was beginning to feel that living in a man's house did not
constitute a knowledge of him, and yet there were the things he himself
had seen and heard.

"But, he's looking after her now as if she were a baby herself," he
protested. "He urged me to look after her, and see that she didn't have to
lift Jack yet for a while, and to humour the hired girl for fear they'd
lose her, and he even insisted that I keep up the reading aloud that I've
been doing for them."

"I don't doubt that," the old doctor said, a bit nettled. "He's not all
bad. He's a right good fellow--that's the very point I'm trying to make.
It's because he _owns_ her and thinks he has a right to run her
affairs--that's the trouble at the bottom of the whole thing. Now that
she's sick he'll see that she don't have to lift the baby. If she owned
herself she could stop lifting the baby before she got sick; a man can't
tell when a woman feels like working and when she don't. What I want to
say is, that a man browbeats a woman because she hasn't any money and
can't help herself. Give a woman a home of her own that he couldn't touch,
and then give her an income fit to raise her children, and he'd come into
that house and behave, or he'd be sent out again, and she wouldn't age ten
years in three, nor be dragged down to the hell of nagging to protect
herself against him. I tell you, Noland, Kansas would be a stronger state
right now, and a damned sight stronger state twenty years from now, if the
women owned and run half of its affairs at least." Doctor Morgan ended
quite out of breath.

"I guess you're right, doctor, but I've got to get some barb wire loaded
to take home, and you've preached the regulation hour and a half," Hugh
said. He was living in the Hunter home, and he really loved both John
Hunter and his wife, and honour demanded that he should not gossip about
them.

"Right you are, my boy. And I see your point too; I've no business to talk
professional secrets even to you." He laid his arm affectionately across
the younger man's shoulder and squared him around so that he could look
into his face. "This is only a s