"The place for a woman," said Brownwell to the assembled company on the Barclay veranda one evening, when Jane had asked him why he did not take Molly to the opening of the new hotel at Garden City, "the place for woman is in the sacred precincts of home, 'far from the madding crowd's ignoble throng.' The madame and I," with a flourish of his cane, "came to that agreement early, eh, my dear, eh ?" he asked, poking her masterfully with his cane.

And Molly Brownwell, wistful-eyed and fading, smiled and assented, and the incident passed as dozens of other incidents passed in the Ridge, which made the women wish they had Adrian Brownwell, to handle for just one day.

But the angels in that department of heaven where the marriages are made are exceedingly careful not to give to that particular kind of women the Adrian Brownwell kind of men, so the experiment which every one on earth for thousands of years has longed to witness, still remains a theory, and Adrian Brownwell traipsed up and down the earth, in his lavender gloves, his long coat and mouse-coloured trousers, his high hat, with his twirling cane, and the everlasting red carnation in his buttonhole.

His absence made it necessary for Molly Brownwell to leave the sacred precincts of the home many and many a Saturday afternoon, to go over the books at the _Banner_ office, make out bills, take them out, and collect the money due upon them and pay off the printers who got out the paper.

But Adrian Brownwell ostentatiously ignored such services and kept up the fiction about the sacred precincts, and often wrote scorching editorials about the "encroachment of women" and grew indignant editorially at the growth of sentiment for woman's suffrage.
On one occasion he left on the copy-hook a fervid appeal for women to repulse the commercialism which "was sullying the fair rose of womanhood," and taking "from woman the rare perfume of her chiefest charm," and then he went away on a ten days' journey, and the foreman of the _Banner_ had to ask Mrs.Brownwell to collect enough money from the sheriff and a delinquent livery-stable keeper to pay the freight charges on the paper stock needed for that week's issue of the paper.
The town came to know these things, and so when Brownwell, who, since his marriage, had taken up his abode at the Culpeppers', hinted at his "extravagant family," the town refused to take him seriously.