She was pretty and neat figured, with very careful hair, though its
colour had been tampered with unsuccessfully, and she wore little,
blue-striped shirtwaists that fitted very close--you know--with low
collars. It was said that she was a good conversationalist and would
talk in low, eager tones to them whose fingers she tooled.

"Still, I didn't think anything of Chester resorting to that sanitary
den of vice. All I think is that he's trying to pretty himself up for
Nettie and maybe show her he can be a man-about-town, like them she has
known in Spokane and in Yonkers, New York, at the select home of Mrs.
W.B. Hemingway and her husband. How little we think when we had ought
to be thinking our darndest! Me? I just went on playing them two
records, the male barytone and the lady mezzo, and trying to curse that
Chinaman into keeping the kitchen door shut on his cooking, with Wilbur
dropping in now and then so him and Nettie could look at his photo,
which was propped up against a book on the centre table--one of them
large three-dollar books that you get stuck with by an agent and never
read--and Nettie dropping into his store now and then to hear him
practise over difficult bits from his piece that he was going to render
at the musical entertainment for the Belgians, with him asking her if
she thought he shaded the staccato passage a mite too heavy, or some
guff like that.

"So here come the concert, with every seat sold and the hall draped
pretty with flags and cut flowers. Some of the boys was down from the
ranch, and you bet I made 'em all come across for tickets, and old
Safety First--Chet's father--I stuck him for a dollar one, though he had
an evil look in his eyes. That's how the boys got so crazy about this
here song. They brought that record back with 'em. And Buck Devine, that
I met on the street that very day of the concert, he give me another