And I did it only to plague him!" "Molly's a good girl," said Reuben, rather as if he expected the assertion to be disputed, "but she was taught to despise folks when she was a baby--wasn't you, pretty ?" "Not you--never you, grandfather." The intimate nature of the conversation grated upon Gay not a little.
There was something splendidly barbaric about the girl, and yet the mixture of her childishness and her cynicism affected him unpleasantly rather than otherwise.

His ideal woman--the woman of the early Victorian period--was submissive and clinging.

He was perfectly assured that she would have borne her wrongs, and even her mother's wrongs, with humility.

Meekness had always seemed to him the becoming mental and facial expression for the sex; and that a woman should resent appeared almost as indelicate as that she should propose.
When supper was over, and Reuben had settled to his pipe, with the old hound at his feet, Molly took down a bunch of keys from a nail in the wall, and lit a lantern with a taper which she selected from a china vase on the mantelpiece.

Once outside she walked a little ahead of Gay and the yellow blaze of the lantern flitted like a luminous bird over the flagged walk bordered by gooseberry bushes.