love of his daughter. Secretly, as though his paternal affection were a
crime, he caressed Julia, and his wife was not long in discovering that
the father cared more for a loving daughter than for a shrewish wife.
She watched him jealously, and had come to regard her daughter as one
who had supplanted her in her husband's affections, and her husband as
robbing her of the love of her daughter. In truth, Mrs. Samuel Anderson
had come to stand so perpetually on guard against imaginary
encroachments on her rights, that she saw enemies everywhere. She hated
Wehle because he was a Dutchman; she would have hated him on a dozen
other scores if he had been an American. It was offense enough that
Julia loved him.

So now she resolved to gain her husband to her side by her version of
the story, and before dinner she had told him how August had charged her
with being false and cruel to Andrew many years ago, and how Jule had
thrown it up to her, and how near she had come to dropping down with
palpitation of the heart. And Samuel Anderson reddened, and declared
that he would protect his wife from such insults. The notion that he
protected his wife was a pleasant fiction of the little man's, which
received a generous encouragement at the hands of his wife. It was a
favorite trick of hers to throw herself, in a metaphorical way, at his
feet, a helpless woman, and in her feebleness implore his protection.
And Samuel felt all the courage of knighthood in defending his
inoffensive wife. Under cover of this fiction, so flattering to the
vanity of an overawed husband, she had managed at one time or another to
embroil him with almost all the neighbors, and his refusal to join
fences had resulted in that crooked arrangement known as a "devil's
lane" on three sides of his farm.

Julia dared not stay away from dinner, which was miserable enough. She