AFTER her peaceful day Alice faced the fact that trouble started oftener with Tom than with her. These thoughts she told to no one, neither did she consider them disloyal. She wondered about them.
She wondered about it the more because Tom on his part had two very different views about her.
In one, Alice saw herself as a feckless, supine thing, incapable of order, who, with open eyes, pusillanimously permitted herself to be bamboozled by her entire household for the sake of a shameful peace. This idea Tom often voiced loudly.
His other idea about her he let out without meaning to. Alice, it seemed, was the one who stirred up discord. If Alice went away, the household ran with exemplary smoothness. With Tom in command, the children at once became responsible and obedient. Laurie forgot her habits of disorder; once under the hands of a master she became systematic, patient and given to scrubbing the bottoms of pots and pans without being told. But let Alice come back again and it was all up, because Alice spoiled them all and stirred things up so.
"When we are more civilized," Alice told Tom's mother, "a woman and her children will form the home, the center of things, and the husband will live outside, and come and visit and behave himself, and then things will be less complicated."
To this Mrs. Marcey, instead of being shocked at Alice's flights of imagination, replied:
"I have always said that something will have to be
