The interview that succeeded, had it been reported verbatim,
deserved to be recorded in local history. Deacon Baxter had met
in Jane Tillman a foeman more than worthy of his steel. She was
just as crafty as he, and in generalship as much superior to him
as Napoleon Bonaparte to Cephas Cole. Her knowledge of and her
experiences with men, all very humble, it is true, but decidedly
varied, enabled her to play on every weakness of this particular
one she had in hand, and at the same time skilfully to avoided
alarming him.
Heretofore, the women with whom the Deacon had come in contact
had timidly steered away from the rocks and reefs in his nature,
and had been too ignorant or too proud to look among them for
certain softer places that were likely to be there--since man is
man, after all, even when he is made on a very small pattern.
If Jane Tillman became Mrs. Baxter, she intended to get the whip
hand and keep it; but nothing was further from her intention than
to make the Deacon miserable if she could help it. That was not
her disposition; and so, when the deluded man left her house, he
had made more concessions in a single hour than in all the former
years of his life.
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