Mad Barbara by Warwick Deeping

John Gore rode for Yorkshire the next day, mounted on a good gray nag, with pistols in his holsters, and a servant with a blunderbuss, and a valise strapped on the saddle of a stout brown cob. Travellers had to take their chance of meeting rough gentry on the road, and many a nervous countryman, weighing sixteen stone, made out his will before he did so desperate a thing as travel forty miles. The sea-captain was not a man with jumpy nerves, and his thoughts went to and fro between rentals and harvestings and the ways of women as though he sat smoking at home in a padded chair. Put a man in the saddle on a summer morning, when the dawn is coming up, and all the hedgerows are dashed with dew, and he will be moved to sing, and to think well of the world, for the fresh kisses of the dawn leave no stain upon the mouth.

John Gore was thinking of Barbara Purcell; and the mistake a man so often makes is to accuse a woman of whims when he does not understand her, it being easier to call a thing by a name than to investigate its properties. Man is the creature of a superstition in this respect, and if a cow kicks the milk-pail over he calls her "a cussed beast," and as such she is branded. For man, taking himself so solemnly, cannot stay in his stride to find out why a woman has her silks or her worsteds in a tangle. If she weeps, his great solatium is a sweep of the arm and a kiss. If she seems sulky, it is just her perversity, and it is no more use for him to trouble his wise head about her vapors than to ask a February morning cloud why it shows such a sour face. It is nature's business, and man, unless he happens to be a psychologist, leaves it as such and thinks about his dinner.