As Henry shows the narrator around his cottage, he explains with pride that his wife is responsible for the tidy, well-decorated nature of the house. At one point, Henry adjusts a picture frame, using a simile to describe his wife’s relationship to such adjustments:
Then [Henry] gave it a light finishing pat or two with his hand, and said: “She always does that. You can’t tell just what it lacks, but it does lack something until you’ve done that—you can see it yourself after it’s done, but that is all you know; you can’t find out the law of it. It’s like the finishing pats a mother gives the child’s hair after she’s got it combed and brushed, I reckon.”
Here, Henry uses a simile to compare his wife’s micro adjustments of her décor—and subsequent satisfactory pats—to the process of a mother “comb[ing] and brush[ing]” her child’s hair and then giving it some “finishing pats.” This moment is notable as Twain places these two rough and masculine miners inside of an extremely feminine domestic space and then has them discuss the likewise “feminine” practices of home decorating and child-rearing.
While Henry claims not to understand the art of home décor, as readers later learn, he has flawlessly maintained his home for 19 years, ever since his wife disappeared. And though the narrator seems a rugged man at the start of the story, he is drawn to Henry’s house because of its nurturing and feminine nature. In this way, Twain highlights how masculinity and femininity must exist in a balance (a balance that most male-dominated mining communities lacked).
