old pens and blotters, and probably bestowing glances of disrelish from
time to time round the grimy office where her scrubby little husband
toiled his days away in unromantic squalor.

"I got to tell you about Henrietta. She's one of them like I just said
the harsh things about, with the secret cry in her heart for romance and
adventure and other forbidden things and with a kindly contempt for
peaceful Alonzo. She admits to being thirty-six, so you can figure it
out for yourself. Of course she gets her husband wrong at that, as women
so often do. Alonzo has probably the last pair of side whiskers outside
of a steel engraving and stands five feet two, weighing a hundred and
twenty-six pounds at the ring side, but he's game as a swordfish, and as
for being romantic in the true sense of the word--well, no one that ever
heard him sell a lot in Price's Addition--three miles and a half up on
the mesa, with only the smoke of the canning factory to tell a body they
was still near the busy haunts of men, that and a mile of concrete
sidewalk leading a life of complete idleness--I say no one that ever
listened to Lon sell a lot up there, pointing out on a blue print the
proposed site of the Carnegie Library, would accuse him of not being
romantic.

"But of course Henrietta never sees Lon's romance and he ain't always
had the greatest patience with hers--like the time she got up the Art
Loan Exhibit to get new books for the M.E. Sabbath-school library and
got Spud Mulkins of the El Adobe to lend 'em the big gold-framed oil
painting that hangs over his bar. Some of the other ladies objected to
this--the picture was a big pink hussy lying down beside the
ocean--but Henrietta says art for art's sake is pure to them that are
pure, or something, and they're doing such things constantly in the
East; and I'm darned if Spud didn't have his oil painting down and the