The Tinder-Box

I can't remember when I didn't look with eagerness for that crinkle in his eyes, even when I was a child and he what I at that time considered a most glorious grownup individual, though he must have been the most helpless hobbledehoy that ever existed.

"You don't need another vine," I answered mutinously.

"You know I want you, but Jasper's is the privilege of looking after you," he answered calmly. "I want you to be happy, Evelina," and I knew as I raised my eyes to his that I could consider myself settled in my own home.

"Well, then, come and have dinner num ber two with me," I answered with a laugh that covered a little happy sigh that rose from my heart at the look in the kind eyes bent on mine.

I felt, Jane, you would have approved of that look! It was so human to human.

He came over with me, and that was one jolly party in the old dining-room. They all stayed until almost sunset, and almost everybody in town dropped in during the afternoon to welcome me home, and ask me where I was going to live. Jasper and Petunia hovering in the background, the tea-tray out on the porch set with the silver and damask all of them knew of old, and the appearance of having been installed with the full approval of Cousin Martha and James and the rest of the family, stopped the questions on their lips, and they spent the afternoon much enlivened but slightly puzzled.

Time doesn't do much to people in a place like the Harpeth Valley, that is out of the stream of modern progress; and most of my friends seem to have just been sitting still, rocking their lives along in the greatest ease and comfort.

Still, Mamie Hall has three more kiddies, which, added to the four she had when I left, makes a slightly high, if charming, set of stair-steps. Mamie also looks decidedly worn, though pathetically sweet. Ned was with her, and as fresh as any one of the buds. Maternity often wilts women, but paternity is apt to make men bloom with the importance of it. Ned showed off the bunch as if he had produced them all, while Mamie only smiled like an angel in the background.

A slight bit of temper rose in a flush to my cheeks, as I watched Caroline Lellyett sit on the steps and feed cake to one twin and two stair-steps with as much hunger in her eyes for them as there was in theirs for the cake. Lee Greenfield is the responsible party in this case, and she has been loving him hopelessly for fifteen years. Lots of other folks wanted to marry her, but Lee has pinned her in the psychic spot and is watching her flutter.

Polk departed in the trail of Nell Kirkland's fluffy muslin skirts, smoldering dangerously, I felt. Nell has grown up into a most lovely individual, and I felt uneasy about her under Folk's ministrations. Her eyes follow him rather persistently. On the whole, I am glad Jane committed me to this woman's cause. I'll have to begin to exercise the biceps of Nell's heart—as soon as I get some strength into my own.

And after they had all gone, I sat for an hour out on the front steps of my big, empty old house, and enjoyed my own loneliness, if it could be called enjoying. I could hear the Petunia's happy giggle, answering Jasper's guttural pleasantries, out on the cabin porch behind the row of lilac bushes. I do hope that Petunia gets much and the right sort of courting during this week that Jasper has allowed her!

With the last rays of the sun, I had found time to read a long, dear letter from Richard Hall, and though I had transferred it from my pocket to my desk, while I dressed for the afternoon, its crackle was still in my mind. I wondered what it all meant, this dissatisfied longing that human beings send out across time and distance, one to and for another.

If a woman's heart were really like a great big golden chalice, full to the brim with the kind of love she is taught God wants her to have in it for all mankind, both men and women, why shouldn't she offer drafts of it to every one who is thirsty, brothers as well as sisters? I wonder how that would solve Jane's problem of emotional equality! I do love Dicky—and—and I do love Polk—with an inclination to dodge. Now, if there were enough of the right sort of love in me, I ought to be able to get them to see it, and drink it for their comforting, and have no trouble at all with them about their wanting to seize the cup, drain all the love there is in it, shut it away from the rest of the world—and then neglect it.

Yes, why can't I love Polk as I love you, Jane, and have him enjoy it? Yes, why?

I think if I had Dicky off to myself for a long time, and very gently led him up to the question of loving him hard in this new way, he might be induced to sip out of the cup just to see if he liked it—and it might be just what he craved, for the time being; but I doubt it. He would storm and bluster at the idea.

Of course the Crag would let a woman love him in any old kind of new or experimental way she wanted to, if it made her happy. He would take her cup of tenderness and drink it as if it were sacramental wine, on his knees. But he doesn't count. He has to be man to so many people that there is danger of his becoming a kind of superman. Think of the old Mossback be ing a progressive thing like that! I laughed out loud at the idea—but the echo was dismal.

I wonder if Sallie will marry him.

And as I sat and thought and puzzled, the moonlight got richer and more glowing, and it wooed open the throats of the thousand little honeysuckle blossoms, clinging to the vine on the trellis, until they poured out a perfect symphony of perfume to mingle in a hallelujah from the lilacs and roses that ascended to the very stars themselves.

I had dropped my head on my arms, and let my eyes go roaming out to the dim hills that banked against the radiant sky, when somebody seated himself beside me, and a whiff of tobacco blew across my face, sweet with having joined in the honeysuckle chorus. Nobody said a word for a long time, and then I looked up and laughed into the deep, gray eyes looking tenderly down into mine. With a thrill I realized that there was one man in the world I could offer the chalice to and trust him to drink—moderately.

"Jamie," I said in a voice as young as it used to be when I trailed at his heels, "thank you for letting me be contrary and independent and puzzling. I have been busy adventuring with life, in queer places and with people not like—like us. Now I want a little of real living and to think—and feel. May I?"

"You may, dear," the Crag answered in a big comfortable voice, that was a benediction in itself. "I understood last night when you told me that you wanted to come home alone. I can trust Jasper with you, and I am going to sleep down at the lodge room, right across the road here, so I can hear you if you even think out loud. No one shall worry you about it any more. Now will you promise to be happy?"

I could not answer him, I was so full of a deepness of peace. I just laid my cheek against the sleeve of his queer old gray coat, to show him what I could not say.

He let me do it, and went on smoking without noticing me.

Then, after a little while, he began to tell me all about Father and his death, that had come so suddenly while he seemed as well as ever, and how he had worried about my probably not wanting to be left to him, and that he wanted me to feel independent, but to please let him do all that I would to help me, and not to feel that I was alone with nobody to love me. That he was always there, and would be forever and ever.

And he did stay so late that Jasper had to send him home!

There is such a thing as a man's being a father and mother and grown sister and brother and a college-chum and a preacher of the Gospel and a family physician to a woman—with no possibility of being her husband either. She wouldn't so drag such a man from his high estate as to think of such a worldly relation in connection with him.

I have certainly collected some phenomena in the reaction of a woman's heart this day. Did you choose me wisely for these experiments, Jane?

It takes a woman of nerve to go to housekeeping in a tinder-box, when she isn't sure she even knows what flint is when she sees it, and might strike out a spark without intending it at all.

CHAPTER IV

Yes, it is gratifying to know that Mary Elizabeth is so happily engaged to the young teacher who has been in her work with her. She writes that she was encouraged by our resolution, at last to be her best self while in his presence as she had not had the courage to do last year. You see, Evelina? And also, you are right in your conclusion that there is not enough abstract love in this world of brotherhood and sisterhood; that the doctrine of divine love calls us to give more and more of it. We cannot give too much! But also, considerations for the advancement of the world call for experiments by the more illumined women along more definite and concrete lines. How old is this Mr. Hayes, on whom you have chosen to note the reactions of sisterly affection? Are you sure that he is not a fit subject for your consideration in the matter of a choice for a mate?

Remember to be as frank in your expressions of regard for him as he is in his of regard for you. That is the crux of the whole matter. Be frank, be courageous! Let a man look freely into your heart, and thus encouraged he will open his to you. Then you will both have an opportunity to judge each other with reference to a life-long union. It is the only way; and remember what rests on you in this matter. The destinies of many women are involved.

I don't say this in a spirit of levity, but I do wish Polk Hayes and Jane Mathers were out on the front steps in the moonlight, after a good supper that has made him comfortable, Jane to be attired in something soft that would float against his arm, whether she wanted it to or not! I believe it would be good for Jane, and make things easier for me. Be frank with Polk as to how much he asphyxiates me? I know better than to blow out the gas like that! No, Jane!

But what is a woman going to do when she is young and hearty and husky, with the blood running through her veins at a two-forty rate, when her orchard is in bloom, the mocking-birds are singing the night through, and she is not really in love with anybody? The loneliness does fill her heart full of the solution of love, and she has got to pour off some of it into somebody's life. There is plenty of me to be both abstract and concrete, at the same time, and I thought of Uncle Peter.

Uncle Peter Is the most explosive and crusty person that ever happened in Glendale, and it takes all of Aunt Augusta's energy, common-sense and force of character to keep him and the two chips he carries on his shoulders, as a defiance to the world in general, from being in a constant state of combustion. He has been ostensibly the Mayor of Glendale for twenty-five years, and Aunt Augusta has done the work of the office very well indeed, while he has blown up things in general with great energy. He couldn't draw a long breath without her, but of course he doesn't realize it. He thinks he is in a constant feud with her and her sex. His ideas on the woman question are so terrific that I have always run from them, but I concluded that it would be a good thing for me to liquefy some of my vague humanitarianism, and help Aunt Augusta with him, while she wrestles with the City Council on the water question. Anyway, I have always had a guarded fondness for the old chap.

I chose a time when I knew Aunt Augusta had to be busy with his report of the disastrous concrete paving trade the whole town had been sold out on, and I lay in wait to capture him and the chips. This morning I waited behind the old purple lilac at the gate, which immediately got into the game by sweeping its purple-plumed arms all around me, so that not a tag of my dimity alarmed him as he came slowly down the street.

"Uncle Peter," I said, as I stepped out in front of him suddenly, "please, Uncle Peter, won't you come in and talk to me?"

"Hey? Evelina?"

"Yes, Uncle Peter, it's Evelina," and I hesitated with terror at the snap in his dear old eyes, back under their white brows. Then I let my eyes uncover my heart full of the elixir I had prepared for him, and offered him as much as he could drink.

"I'm lonely," I said, with a little catch in my voice.

"Lonely—hey?" he grumbled, but his feet hesitated opposite my gate.

In about two and a half minutes I had him seated in a cushioned rocker on the south side of the porch. Jasper had given us both a mint julep, and Uncle Peter was much Jess thirsty than he had been for a long time. Aunt Augusta is as temperate in all things as a steel ramrod.

"You see, Uncle Peter, I needed you so that I just had to kidnap you," I said to him, as he wiped his lips with a pocket-handkerchief, as stiffly starched as was his wife herself.

"Why didn't you go over and live in James's hennery—live with James—hey?" he snapped, with the precision of a pistol cap.

To be just, I suppose Aunt Augusta's adamant disposition accounts, to some extent, for Uncle Peter's explosive way of thinking and speaking. A husband would have to knock Aunt Augusta's nature down to make any impression whatever on it. Uncle Peter always has the air of firing an idea and then ducking his head to avoid the return shot.

"His house is so full, and I need a lot of space to carry on my work," I answered him, with the words I have used so often in the last two weeks that they start to come when the Petunia asks me if I want waffles or batter-cakes for supper.

"Well, Sallie Carruthers will get him, and then there'll be a dozen more to run the measure over—children—hey? All girls! A woman like Sallie would not be content with producing less than a dozen of her kind—hey?"

His chuckle was so contagious that I couldn't help but join him, though I didn't like it so very much. But why shouldn't I? Sallie is such a gorgeous woman that a dozen of her in the next generation will be of value to the State. Still, I didn't like it. I didn't enjoy thinking of Cousin James as so serving his country.

"Carruthers left her to James—he'll have to take care of her. Henry turned toes in good time. Piled rotten old business and big family on to James's shoulders, and then died—good time—hey? Get a woman on your hands, only thing to do is to marry or kill her. Poor James—hey?" He peered at me with a twinkle in his eyes that demanded assent from me.

"Why, Uncle Peter, I don't know that Sallie has any such idea. She grieves dreadfully over Mr. Carruthers, and I don't believe she would think of marrying again," I answered, trying to put enough warmth in my defense to convince myself.

"Most women are nothing but gourd-vines, grow all over a corn-stalk, kill it, produce gourds until it frosts, and begin all over again in the next generation. James has to do the hoeing around Sallie's roots, and feed her. Might as well marry her—hey?"

"Does—does Cousin James have to support Sallie and the children, Uncle Peter?" I asked, coming with reluctance down to the rock-bed of the discussion.

"Thinks he does, and it serves him right—serves him right for starting out to run a widow-ranch in the first place; it's like making a collection of old shoes. He let Henry Carruthers persuade him to mortgage everything and buy land on the river for the car-shops of the new railroad, which just fooled the town out of a hundred thousand dollars, and is going by on the other side of the river with the shops up at Bolivar. If James didn't get all the lawing in Alton County they would all starve to death—which would be hard on the constitution of old lady Hargrove, and her two hundred-weight."

"Oh, has Cousin James really lost all of his fortune?" I asked, and I was surprised at the amount of sympathetic dismay that rose in me at the information.

"Everything but what he carries around under that old gray hat of his—not so bad a fortune, at that!—hey?"

I feel I am going to love Uncle Peter for the way he disdainfully admires Cousin James.

"And—and all of his—his guests are really dependent on him?" I asked again, as the stupendous fact filtered into my mind.

"All the flock, all the flock," answered Uncle Peter, with what seemed, under the circumstances, a heartless chuckle. "They each one have little dabs of property, about as big as a handful of chicken feed, and as they have each one given it all to James to manage, they expect an income in return—and get it—all they ask for. A lot of use less old live stock—all but Sallie, and she's worse—worse, hey?"

I agreed with his question—but I didn't say so.

"Glad your money is safe in Public Town Bonds and City Securities, Evelina. If James could, he might lose it, and you'd have to move over. It would then be nip and tuck between you and Sallie which got James—nip and tuck—hey?"

"Oh, Uncle Peter!" I exclaimed with positive horror that was flavored with a large dash of indignation.

"Well, yes, a race between a widow and a girl for a man is about like one between a young duck and a spring chicken, across a mill-pond—girl and chicken lose—hey? But let Sallie have him, since you don't need him. I've got to go home and listen to Augusta talk about my business, that she knows nothing in the world about, or I won't be ready for town meeting this afternoon. Women are all fools,—hey?"

"Will you come again, Uncle Peter?" I asked eagerly. I had set out to offer Uncle Peter a cup of niecely affection, and I had got a good, stiff bracer to arouse me in return.

"I will, whenever I can escape Augusta," he answered, and there was such a kindly crackle in his voice that I felt that he had wanted and needed what I had offered him. "I'll drop in often and analyze the annals of the town with you. Glad to have you home, child, good young blood to stir me up—hey?"

And as I sat and watched the Mayor go saunteringly down the street, with his crustiness carried like a child on his shoulder, which it delighted him to have knocked off, so that he could philosophize in the restoring of it to its position, suddenly a realization of the relation of Glendale to the world in general was forced upon me—and I quailed.

Glendale is like a dozen other small towns in the Harpeth Valley; they are all drowsy princesses who have just waked up enough to be wondering what did it. The tentative kiss has not yet disclosed the presence of the Prince of Revolution, and they are likely to doze for another century or two. I think I had better go back into the wide world and let them sleep on. One live member is likely to irritate the repose of the whole body.

Their faint stirrings of progress are pathetic.

They have an electric plant, but, as I have noted before, the lights therefrom show a strong trace of their pine-knot heredity, and go out on all important occasions, whether of festivity or tragedy. Kerosene lamps have to be kept filled and cleaned if a baby or a revival or a lawn festival is expected.

They have a lovely, wide concrete pavement in front of six of the stores around the public square, but no two stretches of the improvement join each other, and it makes a shopping progression around the town somewhat dangerous, on account of the sudden change of grade of the sidewalk, about every sixty feet. Aunt Augusta wanted Uncle Peter to introduce a bill in the City Council forcing all of the property owners on the Square to put down the pavement in front of their houses, at small payments per annum, the town assuming the contract at six per cent. Uncle Peter refused, because he said that he felt a smooth walk around the Square would call out what he called "a dimity parade" every afternoon.

They have a water system that is supplied by so much mud from the river that it often happens that the town has to go unwashed for a week, while the pipes are cleaned out. There is a wonderful spring that could be used, with a pump to supply the town, Aunt Augusta says.

The City Council tied up the town for a hundred thousand dollars' subscription to the new railroad, and failed to tie the shops down in the contract. They are to be built in Bolivar. A great many of the rich men have lost a lot of money thereby, Cousin James the most of all, and everybody is sitting up in bed blinking.

There are still worse things happening in the emotional realm of Glendale.

Lee Greenfield has been in the state of going to ask Caroline Lellyett to marry him for fifteen years, and has never done it. Caroline has been beautiful all her life, but she is getting so thin and faded at thirty that she is a tragedy. Lee goes to see her twice a week, and on Sunday afternoon takes her out in his new and rakish runabout, that is as modern as his behavior is obsolete. Caroline knows no better, and stands it with sublime patience and lack of character. That is a situation I won't be able to keep my hands off of much longer.

Ned Hall's wife has seven children with the oldest one not twelve, and she looks fifty. Ned goes to all the dances at the Glendale Hotel dining-room and looks thirty. He dresses beautifully and Nell and all the girls like to dance with him. Just ordinary torture wouldn't do for him.

Polk Hayes wouldn't be allowed to run loose in London society.

Sallie Carruthers is a great big husky woman, with three children that she is responsible for having had. She and her family must consume tons of green groceries every month and a perfectly innocent man pays for them.

Mrs. Dodd, the carpenter-and-contractor's wife is a Boston woman who came down here—Before I could write all about that Boston girl so that Jane could understand perfectly the situation Polk came around from the side street and seated himself on the railing of the porch so near the arm of my chair that I couldn't rock without inconveniencing him.

I am glad he found me in the mood I was in and I am glad to record the strong-minded—it came near being the strong-armed—contest in which we indulged.

"Me for a woman that has a lot of spirit—she is so much sweeter when tamed, Evelina," was one of the gentle remarks with which he precipitated the riot. "I think it has been spunkily fascinating of you to come and live by yourself in this old barn. It keeps me awake nights just to think of you over here—alone. How long is the torture to go on?"

Jane, I tried, but if I had frankly and courageously shown Polk Hayes what was in my heart for him at that moment, I couldn't have answered for the results.

From the time I was eighteen until I was twenty the same sort of assault and battery had been handed out to me from him. He had beaten me with his love. He didn't want me—he doesn't want any woman except so long as he is uncertain that he can get her. Just because I had been firm with him when even a child and denied him, he has been merciless. And now that I am a woman and armed for the combat, it will be to the death.

Shall I double and take refuge in a labyrinth of subterfuge or turn and fight? So I temporized to-day.

"It is lonely—but not quite 'torture' to me, with the family so close, across the street," I answered him, and I went on whipping the lace on a piece of fluff I am making, to discipline myself because I loathe a needle so. "Please don't you worry over me, dear." I raised my eyes to his and I tried the common citizenship look. It must have carried a little way for he flushed, the first time I ever saw him do it, and his hand with the cigarette in it shook.

"Evelina, are you real or a—farce?" he asked, after a few minutes of peace.

"I'm trying to be real, Polk," I answered, and this time I raised my eyes with perfect frankness. "If you could define a real woman, Polk, in what terms would you express her?" I asked him straight out from the shoulder.

"Hell fire and a hallelujah chorus, if she's beautiful," he answered me promptly.

I laughed. I thought it was best under the circumstances.

"I'll tell you, Evelina," he continued, stealthily. "A man just can't generalize the creatures. Apparently they are craving nothing so much as emotional excitement and when you offer it to them they want to go to housekeeping with it. Love is a business with them and not an art."

"Would you like to try a genuine friendship with one. Polk?" I asked, and again struck from the shoulder—with my eyes.

"Help! Not if you mean yourself, beautiful," he answered promptly and with fervor. "I wouldn't trust myself with you one minute off-guard like that."

"You could safely."

"But I won't!"

"Will you try?"

"No!"

"Will you go over and sit in that chair while I tell you something calmly, quietly, and seriously? It'll give you a new sensation and maybe it will be good for you." I looked him straight in the face and the battle of our eyes was something terrific. I had made up my mind to have it out with him then and there. There was nothing else to do. I would be frank and courageous and true to my vow—and accept the consequences.

He slid along the railing of the porch and down into the chair in almost a daze of bewilderment.

"Polk," I began, concealing a gulp of terror, "I love you more than I can possibly—"

"Say, Polk, I let the Pup git hung by her apron to the wheel of your car out in the road and her head is dangersome kinder upside down. It might run away. Can you come and git her loose for me?"

Henrietta's calmness under dire circumstances was a lesson to both Polk and me, for with two gasps that sounded as one we both raced across the porch, down the path and out to the road where Folk's Hupp runabout stood by the worn old stone post that had tethered the horses of the wooers of many generations of the maids of my house.

But, prompt as our response to Henrietta's demand for rescue had been, Cousin James was there before us. He stood in the middle of the dusty road with the tousled mite in his arms, soothing her frightened sobs against his cheek with the dearest tenderness and patting Sallie on the back with the same comforting.

"Oh, Henrietta, how could you nearly kill your little sister like this?" Sallie sobbed. "Please say something positive to her, James!"

"Henrietta," began Cousin James with a suspicion of embarrassment at Polk's and my presence at the domestic scene. Polk choked a chuckle and I could have murdered him.

"Wait a minute," said Henrietta, in her most commanding voice. "Sallie, didn't you ask me to take that Pup from Aunt Dilsie, 'cause of the phthisic, and keep her quiet while the Kit got a nap, and didn't I ask you if it would be all right if I got her back whole and clean?"

"Yes, Henrietta, but you—"

"Ain't she whole all over and clean?"

"Yes, but—"

"Couldn't nobody do any better than that with one of them twins. I won't try. If I have to 'muse her it has to be in my own way." And with her head in the air the Bunch marched up the walk to the house.

At this Polk shouted and the rest of us laughed.

"Polk, please don't encourage Henrietta in the way she treats me and her little sisters," Sallie begged between her laughs and her half-swallowed sobs. "I need my friends' help with my children, not to have them make it hard for me. Henrietta is devoted to you and you could influence her so for the best. Please try to help me make a real woman out of her and not some sort of a terrible—terrible suffragette."

Sallie is the most perfectly lovely woman I almost ever saw. She has great violet eyes with black lashes that beg you for a piece of your heart, and her mouth is as sweet as a blush rose with cheeks that almost match it in rosiness. She and the babies always remind me of a cluster rose and roses, flower and buds, and I don't see why every man that sees her is not mad about her. They all used to be before she married, and I suppose they will be again as soon as the crepe gets entirely worn off her clothes. As she stood with the bubbly baby in her arms and looked up at Polk I couldn't see how he could take it calmly.

"Sallie," he answered seriously, with a glint in his eyes over at me, "if you'll give me a few days longer, I will then have found out by experience what a real woman is and I'll begin on Henrietta for you accordingly."

"Don't be too hard on the kiddie," Cousin James answered him with the crinkle in the corner of his eyes that might have been called shrewd in eyes less beautifully calm. "Let's trust a lot to Henrietta's powers of observation of her mother and—her neighbors." He smiled suddenly, with his whole face, over both Sallie and me, and went on down the street in a way that made me sure he was forgetting all about all of us before he reached the corner of the street.

"Isn't that old mossback a treat for the sight of gods and men?" asked Polk with a laugh as we all stood watching the old gray coat-tails flapping in the warm breeze that was rollicking across the valley.

"I don't know what I would do without him," said Sadie softly, with tears suddenly misting the violets in her eyes as she turned away from us with the baby in her arms and went slowly up the front walk of Widegables.

"Please come stay with me a little while, Evelina," she pleaded back over her shoulder. "I feel faint."

I hesitated, for, as we were on my side of the Road, Polk was still my guest.

"Go on with Sallie, sweetie," he answered my hesitating. "I don't want the snapped-off fraction of a declaration like you were about to offer me. I can bide my time—and get my own." With which he turned and got into his car as I went across the street.

Jane, I feel encouraged. I have done well to-day to get half way through my declaration of independence—though he doesn't think that is what it is going to be—to Polk. If I can just tell him how much I love him, before he makes love to me we can get on such a sensible footing with each other. I'll command the situation then.

But suppose I do get Polk calmed down to a nice friendship after old Plato's recipe, what if I want to marry him?

Do I want to marry a friend?

Yes, I do!

No—no!

CHAPTER V

This has been a remarkable afternoon and I wish Jane had been in Glendale to witness it.

"Say, Evelina, all the folks over at our house have gone crazy, and I wish you would come over and help Cousin James with 'em," Henrietta demanded, as I sat on my side porch, calmly hemming a ruffle on a dress for the Kitten. Everybody sews for the twins and, as much as I hate it, I can't help doing it.

"Why, Henrietta, what is the matter?" I demanded, as I hurried down the front walk and across the road at her bare little heels. By the time I got to the front gate I could hear sounds of lamentation.

"A railroad train wants to run right through the middle of all their dead people and Sallie started the crying. Dead's dead, and if Cousin James wants 'em run over. I wants 'em run over too." She answered over her shoulder as we hurried through the wide front hall.

And a scene that beggars description met my eyes, as I stood in the living-room door. I hope this account I am going to try and write will get petrified by some kind of new element they will suddenly discover some day and the manuscript be dug up from the ruins of Glendale to interest the natives of the Argon age about 2800 A. D.

Sallie sat in the large armchair in the middle of the room weeping in the slow, regular way a woman has of starting out with tears, when she means to let them flow for hours, maybe days, and there were just five echoes to her grief, all done in different keys and characters.

Cousin Martha knelt beside the chair and held Sallie's head on her ample bosom, but I must say that the expression on her face was one of bewilderment, as well as of grief.

The three little Horton cousins sat close together in the middle of the old hair-cloth sofa by the window and were weeping as modestly and helplessly as they did every thing else in life, while Mrs. Hargrove, in her chair under her son's portrait, was just plainly out and out howling.

And on the hearth-rug, before the tiny fire of oak chips that the old ladies liked to keep burning all summer, stood the master of the house and, for once in my life, I have seen the personification of masculine helplessness. He was a tragedy and I flew straight to him with arms wide open, which clasped both his shoulders as I gave him a good shake to arouse him from his paralyzation.

"What's the matter?" I demanded, with the second shake.

"I'm a brute, Evelina," he answered, and a sudden discouragement lined every feature of his beautiful biblical face. I couldn't stand that and I hugged him tight to my breast for an instant and then administered another earthquake shake.

"Tell me exactly what has happened," I demanded, looking straight into his tragic eyes and letting my hands slip from his shoulders down his arms until they held both of his hands tight and warm in mine.

Jane, I was glad that I had offered the cup of my eyes to him full of this curious inter-sex elixir of life that you have induced me to seek so blindly, for he responded to the dose immediately and the color came back into his face as he answered me just as sensibly as he would another man.

"The men who are surveying the new railroad from Cincinnati to the Gulf have laid their experimental lines across the corner of Greenwood Cemetery and they say it will have to run that way or go across the river and parallel the lines of the other road. If they come on this side of the river they will force the other road to come across, too, and in that case we will get the shops. It just happens that such a line will make necessary the removal of—of poor Henry's remains to another lot. Sallie's is the only lot in the cemetery that is that high on the bluff. Henry didn't like the situation when he bought it himself, and I thought that, as there is another lot right next to her mother's for sale, she would not—but, of course, I was brutal to mention it to her. I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me, Sallie." And as he spoke he extracted himself from me and walked over and laid his hand on Sallie's head.

"It was such a shock to her—poor Henry," sobbed little Cousin Jasmine, and the other two little sisters sniffed in chorus.

"To have railroad trains running by Greenwood at all will be disturbing to the peace of the dead," snorted Mrs. Hargrove. "We need no railroad in Glendale. We have never had one, and that is my last word—no!"

"Four miles to the railroad station across the river is just a pleasant drive in good weather," said Cousin Martha, plaintively, as she cuddled Sallie's sobs more comfortably down on her shoulder.

"I feel that Henry would doubt my faithfulness to his memory, if I consented to such a desecration," came in smothered tones from the pillowing shoulder.

And not one of all those six women had stopped to think for one minute that the minor fact of the disturbing of the ashes of Henry Carruthers would be followed by the major one of the restoration of the widow's fortune and the lifting of a huge financial burden off the strong shoulders they were all separately and collectively leaning upon.

I exploded, but I am glad I drew the Crag out on the porch and did it to him alone.

"Evelina, you are refreshing if strenuous," he laughed, after I had spent five minutes in stating my opinions of women in general and a few in particular. "But I ought not to have hurt Sallie by telling her about the lines until they are a certainty. It is so far only a possibility. They may go across the river anyway."

"And as for seeing Sallie swaddled in your consideration, and fed yourself as a sacrifice from a spoon, I am tired of it," I flamed up again. "It's not good for her. Feed and clothe her and her progeny,—men in general have brought just such burdens as that upon you in particular by their attitude towards us,—but do let her begin to exert just a small area of her brain on the subject of the survival of the fit to live. You don't swaddle or feed me!"

"Eve," he said, softly under his breath as his wonderful gentle eyes sank down way below the indignation and explosiveness to the quiet pool that lies at the very bottom of my heart.

Nobody ever found it before and I didn't know it was there myself, but I felt as if it were being drained up into Heaven.

"Eve!" He said again, and it is a wonder that I didn't answer:

"Adam!"

I don't know just what would have happened if Uncle Peter hadn't broken in on the interview with his crustiest chips on both shoulders and so much excitement bottled up that he had to let it fly like a double reporter.

"Dodson is down at the Hotel looking for you, James," he began as he hurried up the steps. "Big scheme this—got him in a corner if the C. & G. comes along this side of Old Harpeth—make him squeal—hey?"

"Who's Dodson?" I asked with the greatest excitement. I was for the first time getting a whiff of the schemes of the masculine mighty, but I was squelched promptly by Uncle Peter.

"We've no time for questions, Evelina, now—go back to your tatting—hey?" He answered me as he began to button hole the Crag and lead him down the steps.

"Dodson is the man who is laying down and contracting for the line across the river, Evelina," answered Cousin James without taking any notice whatever of Uncle Peter's squelching of me. "If this other line can just be secured he will have to come to our terms—and the situation will be saved." As he spoke he took my hand in his and led me at his side, down the front walk to the gate, talking as he went, for Uncle Peter was chuckling on ahead like a steam tug in a hurry.

"And the shades of Henry will again assume the maintenance of his family," I hazarded with lack of respect of the dead, impudence to Cousin James about his own affairs, and unkindness by implication to Sallie, who loves me better than almost anybody in the world does. And I got my just punishment by seeing a lovely look of tender concern rise in Cousin James's eyes as he stopped short in the middle of the walk.

"I want to go back a minute to speak to Sallie before I go on down town," he said, quickly, and before Uncle Peter's remonstrances had exploded, he had taken the steps two at a bound and disappeared in the front door.

"Sooner he marries that lazy lollypop the better," fumed Uncle Peter, as he waited at the gate. "The way for a man to quench his thirst for woman-sweets is to marry a pot of honey like that, and then come right on back to the bread and butter game. Here's a letter Jasper gave me to bring along for you from town. Go on and read it and do not disturb the workings of my brain while I wait for James—workings of a great brain—hey?"

I took the letter and hurried across the street because I wanted anyway to get to some place by myself and think. There was no earthly reason for it but I felt like an animal that has been hurt and wants to go off and lick its wounds. A womanly woman that lives a lovely appealing life right in a man's own home has a perfect right to gain his love, especially if she is beautifully unconscious of her appeal. Besides, why should a man want to take an independent, explosive, impudent firebrand with all sorts of dreadful plots in her mind to his heart? He wouldn't and doesn't!

There is no better sedative for a woman's disturbed and wounded emotions than a little stiff brain work. Richard's letter braced my viny drooping of mind at once and from thinking into the Crag's affairs of sentiment, I turned with masculine vigor to begin to mix into his affairs of finance. However, I wish that the first big business letter I ever got in my life hadn't had to have a strain of love interest running through it! Still Dickie is a trump card in the man pack.

It seems that as his father is one of the most influential directors and largest stockholders in this new branch of the Cincinnati and Gulf railroad he has got the commission for making the plans for all the stations along the road, and he wants to give me the commission for drawing all the gardens for all the station-yards. It will be tremendous for both of us so young in life, and I never dared hope for such a thing. I had only hoped to get a few private gardens of some of my friends to laze and pose over, but this is startling. My mind is beginning to work on in terms of hedges and fountains already and Dickie may be coming South any minute.

And besides the hedges and gravel paths I have a feeling that Dickie's father and the Crag and Sallie's girl-babies are fomenting around in my mind getting ready to pop the cork of an idea soon. The combination feels like some kind of a hunch—I sat still for a long time and let it seethe, while I took stock of the situation.

There is a strange, mysterious kind of peace that begins to creep across the Harpeth Valley, just as soon as the sun sinks low enough to throw the red glow over the head of Old Harpeth. I suppose it happens in other hill-rimmed valleys in other parts of the Universe, but it does seem as if God himself is looking down to brood over us, and that the valley is the hollow of His hand into which he is gathering us to rest in the darkness of His night. I felt buffeted and in need of Him as I sank down under the rose-vine over the porch and looked out across my garden to the blue and rose hills beyond.

I have been in Glendale a whole month now, and I can't see that my influence has revolutionized the town as yet. I don't seem to be of half the importance that I thought I was going to be. I have tried, and I have offered that bucket of love that I thought up to everybody, but whether they have drunk of it to profit I am sure I can't say. In fact, my loneliness has liquefied my gaseous affection into what almost looks like officiousness.

Still, I know Uncle Peter is happier than he ever was before, because he has got me to come to as a refuge from Aunt Augusta, a confidante for his views of life that he is not allowed to express at home, and also the certainty of one of Jasper's juleps.

Sallie has grown so dependent on me that my shoulders are assuming a masculine squareness to support her weight. I am understudying Cousin James to such an extent over at Widegables that I feel like the heir to his house. Cousin Martha sends for me when the chimney smokes and the cows get sick. I have twice changed five dollars for little Cousin Jasmine, and sternly told the man from out on their farm on Providence Road that he must not root up the lavender bushes to plant turnip-greens in their places. I afterwards rented the patch from him to grow the lavender because he said he couldn't lose the price that the greens would bring him "for crotchets."

Mrs. Hargrove has given me her will to keep for her, and the sealed instructions for her burial. I hope when the time comes the two behests will strike a balance, but I doubt it.

Her ideas of a proper funeral seem to coincide with those of Queen Victoria, whom she has admired through life and mourns sincerely.

Henrietta has not been heard to indulge in profane language since I had a long talk with her last week out in the garden, that ended in stubby tears and the gift of a very lovely locket which I impressed upon her was as chaste in design as I wished her speech to become.

The twins have been provided with several very lovely pieces of wearing apparel from my rapidly skill-acquiring needle. That's on the credit side of my balance. But that is all—and it doesn't sound revolutionary, does it, Jane?

Petunia married Jasper according to his word of promise, and I have taught her to cook about five French dishes that he couldn't concoct to save his life, and which help her to keep him in his place. His pomposity grows daily but he eyes me with suspicion when he sees me in secret conclave with Petunia.

"We needs a man around this place," I heard him mutter the other day as I left the kitchen.

I wonder!

The garden has been weeded, replanted, trained, clipped and garnished, and my arms are as husky and strong as a boy's and my nose badly sunburned from my strenuosity with hoe and trimming scissors.

All of which I have done and done well. But when I think of all those five girls that are waiting for me to solve the emotional formula by which they can work out and establish the fact that man equals woman, I get weak in the knees.

Jane's letters are just prods.

Your highly cultivated artistic nature ought to be a very beautiful revelation to the spiritual character of the young Methodist divine you wrote me of in your last letter. Encourage him in every way with affectionate interest in his work, especially in the Epworth League on his country circuit. I am enclosing fifty dollars' subscription to the work and I hope you will give as much You have not mentioned Mr. Hayes for several letters. I fear you are prejudiced against him. Seek to know and weigh his character before you judge him as unfit for your love.

The highly spiritual Mr. Haley glared at Polk for an hour out here on my porch, when he interrupted us in one of our Epworth League talks, in such an unspiritual manner that Polk said he felt as if he had been introduced to the Apostle Paul while he was still Saul of Tarsus. I had to pet the Dominie decorously for a week before he regained his benign manner. Of course, however, it was trying to even a highly spiritual nature like his to have Polk insist on pinning a rose in my hair right before his eyes.

About Polk I feel that I am in the midst of one of those great calm, oily stretches of ocean that a ship is rocked gently in for a few hours before the storm tosses it first to Heaven and then to hell. He is so psychic, and in a way attuned to me, that he partly understands my purpose in declaring my love for him to put him at a disadvantage in his love-making to me, and he hasn't let me do it yet, while his tacit suit goes on. It is a drawn battle between us and is going to be fought to the death. In the meantime Nell—

And while I was on the porch sitting with Richard Hall's letter in my hand, still unread, Nell herself came down the front walk and sat down beside me.

"Why, I thought you had gone fishing with Polk," I said as I cuddled her up to me a second. She laid her head on my shoulder and heaved such a sigh that it shook us both.

"I didn't quite like to go with him alone and Henrietta wouldn't go because a bee had stung the red-headed twin, and she wanted to stay to scold Sallie," she answered with both hesitation and depression in her voice.

"Polk is—is strenuous for a whole day's companionship," I answered, experimentally, for I saw the time had come to exercise some of the biceps in Nell's femininity in preparation for just what I knew she was to get from Polk. My heart ached for what I knew she was suffering. I had had exactly those growing pains for months following that experience with him on the front porch after the dance four years ago. And I had had change of scene and occupation to help.

"I don't understand him at all," faltered Nell, and she raised her eyes as she bared her wound to me.

"Nell," I said with trepidation, as I began on this my first disciple, "you aren't a bit ashamed or embarrassed or humiliated in showing me that you love me, are you?"

"You know I've adored you ever since I could toddle at your heels, Evelina," she answered, and the love-message her great brown eyes flashed into mine was as sweet as anything that ever happened to me.

"Then, why should you wonder and suffer and restrain and be humiliated at your love for Polk?" I asked, firing point blank at all of Nell's traditions. "Why not tell him about it and ask him if he loves you?"

The shot landed with such force that Nell gasped, but answered as straight out from the shoulder as I had aimed.

"I would rather die than have Polk Hayes know how he—he affects me," she answered with her head held high.

"Then, what you feel for him is not worthy love, but something entirely unworthy," I answered loftily, with a very poor imitation of Jane's impressiveness of speech.

"I know it," she faltered into my shoulder, "if it were Mr. James Hardin I loved, I wouldn't mind anybody's knowing it, but something must be wrong with Polk or me or the way I feel. What is it?"

For a moment I got so stiff all over that Nell raised her head from my shoulder in surprise. Do all women feel about the Crag as I do?

"I don't know," I answered weakly.

And I don't know! Oh, Jane, your simple experiment proposition is abouit to become compound quadratics.

Then I got a still further surprise.

"I wouldn't in the least mind telling Mr. James how I like him—if you think it is all right," Nell mused, looking pensively at the first pale star that was rising over Old Harpeth. "I would enjoy it, because I have always adored him, and it would be so interesting to see what he'd say."

"Nell," I said suddenly with determination, "do it! Tell any man you like how much you like him—and see what happens."

"I feel as if—as if"—Nell faltered and I don't blame her; I wouldn't have said as much to her—"I feel that to tell Mr. James I love him would ease the pain, the—pain—that I feel about Polk. It would be so interesting to tell a man a thing like that."

"Do it!" I gasped, and went foot in the class in romantics.

If any jungle explorer thinks he has mapped and charted a woman's heart he had better pack up his instruments of warfare and recorders and come down to Glendale, Tennessee.

Nell and I must have talked further along the same lines, but I don't remember what we said. I have recorded the high lights on the conversation, but long after I lost her I kept my whirlwind feeling of amazement. It was like trying to balance calmly on the lid of the tinder-box when you didn't know whether or not you had touched off the fuse.

Has honeysuckle-garbed Old Harpeth been seeing things like this go on for centuries and not interrupted? I think I would have been sitting there questioning him until now, if Lee and Caroline hadn't stopped at the gate and called to me.

I think Lee was giving Caroline this stroll home from the post-office in the twilight as an extra treat in her week's allowance of him, and she was so soft and glowing and sweet and pale that I wonder the Cherokee roses on my hedge didn't droop their heads with humility before her.

"What's a lovely lady doing sitting all by herself in the gloaming?" Lee asked in his rich, warm voice.

I hate him!

"Come take a walk with us, Evelina, dear," Caroline begged softly, though I knew what it would mean to her if I should intrude on this precious hour with her near-lover.

Please, God—if I seem to be calling You into a profane situation I can't help it; I must have help!—show me some way to assist Caroline to make Lee into a real man and then get him for herself. She must have him and he needs her. And show me a way quick! Amen!

Jane, I hope you will be able to pick the data out of this jumble, but I doubt it. Anyway I'm grateful for the lock and key on this book.

As I stood at the gate and watched Lee and Caroline saunter down the moon-flecked street a mocking bird in the tallest of the oak twins that are my roof shelter called wooingly from one of the top boughs and got his answer from about the same place on the same limb.

If a woman starts out to be a trained nurse to an epidemic of love-making, she is in great danger of doing something foolish her own self. I am even glad it is prayer-meeting night for Mr. Haley; he is safe in performing his rituals. He might misunderstand this mood.

I wonder if I ever was really over in sunny France being wooed and happy!

Of course, I decided the first night I was here that, as circumstances over which I had no control had decreed that Cousin James should stand in the position of enforced protector to me, decent, communistic femino-masculine honor demands that I refrain from any manoeuvers in his direction to attract his thoughts and attention to the feminine me. I can only meet him on the ordinary grounds of fellowship. And I suppose the glad-to-see him coming up the street was of the neuter gender, but it was very interesting.

"What did Dodson have to say—is he coming across?" I demanded of him before he got quite to my gate.

"Not if he can help it," he answered as he came close and leaned against one of the tall stone posts, so that his grandly shaped head with its ante-bellum squirls of hair was silhouetted against the white-starred wistaria vine in a way that made me frantic for several buckets of monochrome water-colors and a couple of brushes as big as those used for white-washing. In about ten great splotches I could have done a masterpiece of him that would have drawn artistic fits from the public of gay Paris. I never see him that I don't long for a box of pastels or get the ghost of the odor of oil-paint in my nose.

"The whole thing will be settled in a month," he continued, with a sigh that had a hint of depression in it and an astral shape of Sallie manifested itself hanging on his shoulder. However, I controlled myself and listened to him. "There is to be a meeting of the directors of both roads over in Bolivar in a few weeks and they are to come to some understanding. The line across the river is unquestionably the cheapest and best grade and there is no chance of getting them to run along our bluff—unless we can show them some advantage in doing so, and I can't see what that will be."

"What makes it of advantage for a railroad to run through any given point in a rural community like this, Cousin James?" I asked, with a glow of intellect mounting to my head, the like of which I hadn't felt since I delivered my Junior thesis in Political Economy with Jane looking on, consumed with pride.

"Towns that have good stock or grain districts around them with good roads for hauling do what is called 'feeding' a railroad," he answered. "Bolivar can feed both roads with the whole of the Harpeth Valley on that side of the river. They'll get the roads, I'm thinking. Poor old Glendale!"

"Isn't there anything to feed the monsters this side of the river?" I demanded, indignant at the barrenness of the south side of the valley of Old Harpeth.

"Very little unless it's the scenery along the bluff," he replied, with the depression sounding still more clearly in his voice and his shoulders drooped against the unsympathetic old stone post in a way that sent a pang to my heart.

"Jamie, is all you've got tied up in the venture?" I asked softly, using the name that a very small I had given him in a long ago when the world was young and not full of problems.

"That's not the worst, Evelina," he answered in a voice that was positively haggard. "But what belongs to the rest of the family is all in the same leaky craft. Carruthers put Sallie's in himself, but I invested the mites belonging to the others. Of course, as far as the old folks are concerned, I can more than take care of them, and if anything happens there's enough life insurance and to spare for them. I don't feel exactly responsible for Sallie's situation, but I do feel the responsibility of their helplessness. Sallie is not fitted to cope with the world and she ought to be well provided for. I feel that more and more every day. Her helplessness is very beautiful and tender, but in a way tragic, don't you think?"

I wish I had dared tell him for the second time that day what I did think on the subject but I denied myself such frankness.

Anyway, men are just stupid, faithful children—some of them faithful, I mean.

I felt that if I stood there talking with the Crag any longer, I might grow pedagogical and teach him a few things so I sent him home across the road. I knew all six women would stay awake until they heard him lock them in, come down to the lodge and lock his own door.

It is very unworthy of me to enjoy his playing a watch-dog of tradition across the road to an emancipated woman like myself. The situation both keeps me awake and puts me to sleep—and it is sweet, though I don't know why.

God never made anything more wonderful than a good man,—even a stupid one. Lights out!