Decker, when he had departed. "Poor Mr. Oakhurst has a miserable room at
the hotel. Suppose you ask him, when he returns from San Francisco,
to stop with us. He can have our spare-room. I don't think," she added
archly, "that Mr. Hamilton will call often." Her husband laughed,
intimated that she was a little coquette, pinched her cheek,
and complied. "The queer thing about a woman," he said afterward
confidentially to Mr. Oakhurst, "is, that, without having any plan
of her own, she'll take anybody's, and build a house on it entirely
different to suit herself. And dern my skin if you'll be able to say
whether or not you didn't give the scale and measurements yourself!
That's what gets me!"

The next week Mr. Oakhurst was installed in the Deckers' cottage. The
business relations of her husband and himself were known to all, and her
own reputation was above suspicion. Indeed, few women were more popular.
She was domestic, she was prudent, she was pious. In a country of great
feminine freedom and latitude, she never rode or walked with anybody
but her husband. In an epoch of slang and ambiguous expression, she was
always precise and formal in her speech. In the midst of a fashion of
ostentatious decoration, she never wore a diamond, nor a single
valuable jewel. She never permitted an indecorum in public. She never
countenanced the familiarities of California society. She declaimed
against the prevailing tone of infidelity and scepticism in religion.
Few people who were present will ever forget the dignified yet stately
manner with which she rebuked Mr. Hamilton in the public parlor for
entering upon the discussion of a work on materialism, lately published;
and some among them, also, will not forget the expression of amused
surprise on Mr. Hamilton's face, that gradually changed to sardonic
gravity, as he courteously waived his point; certainly not Mr. Oakhurst,
who, from that moment, began to be uneasily impatient of his friend,