been sitting in the frowsy station, sleepily awaiting the express,
when Athalia had had this fancy for climbing the hill so that she
might see the view.

"It looks pretty steep," her husband warned her.

"It will be something to do, anyhow!" she said; and added,
with a restless sigh, "but you don't understand that, I suppose."

"I guess I do--after a fashion," he said, smiling at her.
It was only in love's fashion, for really he was incapable
of quite understanding her. To the country lawyer of sober
piety and granite sense of duty, the rich variety of her moods
was a continual wonder and sometimes a painful bewilderment.
But whether he understood the impetuous inconsequence of her
temperament "after a fashion," or whether he failed entirely
to follow the complexity of her thought, he met all her fancies
with a sort of tender admiration. People said that Squire Hall
was henpecked; they also said that he had married beneath him.
His father had been a judge and his grandfather a minister;
he himself was a graduate of a fresh-water college, which later,
when he published his exegesis on the Prophet Daniel, had conferred
its little degree upon him and felt that he was a "distinguished son."
With such a lineage he might have done better, people said,
than to marry that girl, who was the most fickle creature
and no housekeeper, and whose people--this they told one another
in reserved voices--were PLAY-ACTORS! Athalia's mother, who had
been the "play-actor," had left her children an example of duty--
domestic as well as professional duty--faithfully done.
As she did not leave anything else, Athalia added nothing