but that's neither here nor there. We left Alonzo looking cheerily
forward to Ben Sutton on the eleven forty-two, and I went on to do some
errands.

"In the course of these I discovered that others besides Henrietta had
fell hard for the poet of Nature. I met Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale
and she just bubbles about him, she having been at the Prices' the night
before.

"'Isn't he a glorious thing!' she says; 'and how grateful we should be
for the dazzling bit of colour he brings into our drab existence!' She
is a good deal like that herself at times. And I met Beryl Mae Macomber,
a well known young society girl of seventeen, and Beryl Mae says: 'He's
awfully good looking, but do you think he's sincere?' And even Mrs.
Judge Ballard comes along and says: 'What a stimulus he should be to us
in our dull lives! How he shows us the big, vital bits!' and her at that
very minute going into Bullitt & Fleishacker's to buy shoes for her
nine year old twin grandsons! And the Reverend Mrs. Wiley Knapp in at
the Racquet Store wanting to know if the poet didn't make me think of
some wild, free creature of the woods--a deer or an antelope poised for
instant flight while for one moment he timidly overlooked man in his
hideous commercialism. But, of course, she was a minister's wife. I said
he made me feel just like that. I said so to all of 'em. What else could
I say? If I'd said what I thought there on the street I'd of been
pinched. So I beat it home in self-protection. I was sympathizing good
and hearty with Lon Price by that time and looking forward to Ben Sutton
myself. I had a notion Ben would see the right of it where these poor
dubs of husbands wouldn't--or wouldn't dast say it if they did.

"About five o'clock I took another run downtown for some things I'd