He could foreclose a mortgage or press a debt (as long as the debtor's wife or daughter did not appeal to him) as well as another; but the instant a skirt fluttered on the horizon that soft something inside of him appeared, as he expressed it, "to give way." Apart from their afflictions, he had an eye, he used to boast, for but one woman in the world, and she, thank God, was his wife.

Handsome, portly, full-blooded, and slightly overfed, he had let Pussy twine him about her little finger ever since the afternoon when he had first seen her, small, trim, and with "a way with her," at the age of six.
"Poor, poor child," said Pussy, cuddling Jane and the baby together against her sympathetic bosom.

"Something must be done, Cousin Fanny.
Something must be done, as Mr.Wrenn said on the way down, if it's only for the satisfaction of letting Charley know what we think of him." "We've got to put down our pride and take some step," declared Jimmy, wondering vaguely how he could have forgotten the spirited utterance his wife attributed to him.

"I'm all for the authority of the husband, of course, and the sanctity of the home, and everything according to the Bible and all that--but, bless my soul, there's got to be a limit to what a woman is expected to stand.

There're some things, and I know Uncle Meriweather will agree with me, that it isn't in human nature to put up with." "If I were forty years younger I'd call him out and give him a whipping he wouldn't forget in a jiffy," blustered Uncle Meriweather, feebly violent.