"And was--he?" demanded I.

"I don't know. Mary said she couldn't tell exactly. He seemed worried,
sometimes, and quite put out at the way his wife acted about goin' to
places. Then, other times, he didn't seem to notice or care if he did
have to go alone. It wa'n't that he was unkind to her. It was just that
he was so busy lookin' after himself that he forgot all about her. But
Betty took it all as bein' ashamed of her, no matter what he did; and
for a while she just seemed to pine away under it. They'd moved to
Washington by that time and, of course, with him in the President's
Cabinet, it was pretty hard for her.

"Then, all of a sudden, she took a new turn and begun to study and to
try to learn things--everything: how to talk and dress and act, besides
stuff that was just book-learnin'. She's been doin' that for quite a
spell and Mary says she thinks she'd do pretty well now, in lots of
ways, if only she had half a chance--somethin' to encourage her, you
know. But her husband don't seem to take no notice, now, just as if he's
got tired expectin' anythin' of her and that's made her so scared and
discouraged she's too nervous to act as if she did know anythin'.
An' there 't is.

"Well, maybe she is just an ordinary woman," sighed the old man, a
little sternly, "if bein' 'ordinary' means she's like lots of others.
For I suspect, stranger, that, if the truth was told, lots of other big
men have got wives just like her--women what have been workin' so tarnal
hard to help their husbands get ahead that they hain't had time to see
where they themselves was goin'. And by and by they wake up to the fact
that they hain't got nowhere. They've just stayed still, 'way behind.