I says. 'Of course you are right!' 'Of course I am,' says she, 'though I
hardly expected you to see it, you being so hardened a product of the
ancient ideal of slave marriage.'

"At them words it was pretty hard for me to keep on being wily, but I
kept all right. I kept beautifully. I just laughed and said we'd have
Chet Timmins up for supper, and she laughed and said it would be
amusing.

"And it was, or it would have been if it hadn't been so sad and
disgusting. Chet, you see, had plumb crumpled the first time he ever set
eyes on her, and he's never been able to uncrumple. He always choked up
the minute she'd come into the room, and that night he choked worse'n
ever because the little devil started in to lead him on--aiming to show
me how she could study a male, I reckon. He couldn't even ask for some
more of the creamed potatoes without choking up--with her all the time
using her eyes on him, and telling him how a great rough man like him
scared 'poor little me.' Chet's tan bleaches out a mite by the end of
winter, but she kept his face exactly the shade of that new mahogany
sideboard I got, and she told him several times that he ought to go see
a throat specialist right off about that choking of his.

"And after supper I'm darned if she didn't lure him out onto the porch
in the moonlight, and stand there sad looking and helpless, simply
egging him on, mind you, her in one of them little squashy white dresses
that she managed to brush against him--all in the way of cold study,
mind you. Say, ain't we the lovely tame rattlesnakes when we want to be!
And this big husky lummox of a Chester Timmins--him she'd called a
male--what does he do but stand safely at a distance of four feet in the
grand romantic light of the full moon, and tell her vivaciously all