stare at Bartley, in which he had been seeing himself
a young man again, in the first days of his married life.
"I went right back to Lumberville and sold out everything,
and put all I could rake and scrape together into paint.
And Mis' Lapham was with me every time. No hang back
about HER. I tell you she was a WOMAN!"

Bartley laughed. "That's the sort most of us marry."

"No, we don't," said Lapham. "Most of us marry silly
little girls grown up to LOOK like women."

"Well, I guess that's about so," assented Bartley,
as if upon second thought.

"If it hadn't been for her," resumed Lapham, "the paint
wouldn't have come to anything. I used to tell her it
wa'n't the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed
of iron in the ORE that made that paint go; it was
the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in HER."

"Good!" cried Bartley. "I'll tell Marcia that."

"In less'n six months there wa'n't a board-fence, nor
a bridge-girder, nor a dead wall, nor a barn, nor a face
of rock in that whole region that didn't have 'Lapham's
Mineral Paint--Specimen' on it in the three colours we begun
by making." Bartley had taken his seat on the window-sill,
and Lapham, standing before him, now put up his huge
foot close to Bartley's thigh; neither of them minded that.