And she's had to cut him down to twenty-five cents a day for spending-money, and order the stores not to trust him one cent on her account." He was sorry to have Miss Alvira crying so much.

It must be a sloppy business, making her hats and things.

But what did the woman _expect_ of a man like Cousin Bill J., anyway?
Yet somehow it came after a few years the new light upon his old idol.

One day he found that he neither resented nor questioned a thing he heard Clytie herself say about Cousin Bill J.: "Why, he don't know as much as a goat." Here she reconsidered, with an air of wanting to be entirely fair:--"Well, not as much as a goat really _ought_ to know!" And when he overheard old Squire Cumpston saying on the street, a few days later, "Of all God's mean creatures, the meanest is a male human that can keep his health on the money a woman earns!" it was no shock, though he knew that Cousin Bill J.was meant.
Departed then was the glory of his hero, his splendid dimensions shrunk, his effective lustre dulled, his perfect moustache rusted and scraggly, his chin weakened, his pale blue eyes seen to be in force like those of a china doll.
He heard with interest that Squire Cumpston had urged Miss Alvira to divorce her husband, that she had refused, declaring God had joined her to Cousin Bill J.and that no man might put them asunder; that marriage had been raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament and was now indissoluble--an emblem, indeed, of Christ's union with His Church; and that, as she had made her bed, so would she lie upon it.
Nor was the boy alone in regarding as a direct manifestation of Providence the sudden removal of Cousin Bill J.from this life by means of pneumonia.
For Miss Alvira had ever been esteemed and respected even by those who considered that she sang alto half a note off, while her husband had gradually acquired the disesteem of almost the entire village of Edom.
Many, indeed, went so far as to consider him a reproach to his sex.
Yet there were a few who said that even a pretended observance of the decencies would have been better.

Miss Alvira disagreed with them, however, and after all, as the village wag, Elias Cuthbert, said in the post-office next day, "It was _her_ funeral." For Miss Alvira had made no pretense to God; and, what is infinitely harder, she would make none to the world.