"My land! no," said Sylvia. "Men do act queer sometimes."

"I should think so, if this is a sample of it," said Rose, eying the
trampled candy. "Why, he ground his heel into it! What right had he
to tell me I should or should not eat it?" she said, indignantly,
again.

"None at all. Men are queer. Even Mr. Whitman is queer sometimes."

"If he is as queer as that, I don't see how you have lived with him
so long. Did he ever make you drop a nice box of candy somebody had
given you, and trample on it, and then walk off?"

"No, I don't know as he ever did; but men do queer things."

"I don't like Mr. Allen at all," said Rose, walking beside Sylvia
towards the house. "Not at all. I don't like him as well as Mr. James
Duncan."

Sylvia looked at her with quick alarm. "The man who wrote you last
week?"

"Yes, and wanted to know if there was a hotel here so he could come."

"I thought--" began Sylvia.

"Yes, I had begun the letter, telling him the hotel wasn't any good,
because I knew he would know what that meant--that there was no use
in his asking me to marry him again, because I never would; but now I
think I shall tell him the hotel is not so bad, after all," said Rose.

"But you don't mean--"

"I don't know what I do mean," said Rose, nervously. "Yes, I do know
what I mean. I always know what I mean, but I don't know what men
mean making me drop candy I have had given me, and trampling on it,
and men don't know that I know what I mean." Rose was almost crying.

"Go up-stairs and lay down a little while before dinner," said
Sylvia, anxiously.

"No," replied Rose; "I am going to help you. Don't, please, think I
am crying because I feel badly. It is because I am angry. I am going
to set the table."

But Rose did not set the table. She forgot all about it when she had
entered the south room and found Henry Whitman sitting there with the
Sunday paper. She sat down opposite and looked at him with her clear,
blue, childlike eyes. She had come to call him Uncle Henry.

"Uncle Henry?" said she, interrogatively, and waited.

Henry looked across at her and smiled with the somewhat abashed
tenderness which he always felt for this girl, whose environment had
been so very different from his and his wife's. "Well?" he said.

"Uncle Henry, do you think a man can tell another man's reasons for
doing a queer thing better than a woman can?"

"Perhaps."

"I almost know a woman could tell why a woman did a queer thing,