run to for it--but I never will," I answered him, very simply, with not
a trace of the defiance I was fairly flinging at him in either my voice
or manner.

Paris and London and New York are nice safe places to live in, in
comparison with Glendale, Tennessee, in some respects. I wonder why I
hadn't been more scared than I was last night, as the train whirled me
down into proximity to Polk Hayes. But then I had had four years of
forgetting him stored up as a bulwark.

"But what _are_ you going to do, Evelina?" Sallie again began to
question, with positive alarm in her voice, and I saw that it was time
for me to produce some sort of a protector then and there--or
capitulate.

And I record the fact that I wanted to go home with Sallie and Cousin
Martha and the babies and--and live under the roof of the Mossback
forever. All that citizenship-feeling I had got poured into me from Jane
and had tried on Dickie, good old Dickie, had spilled out of me at the
first encounter with Polk.

There is a great big hunt going on in this world, and women are the ones
only a short lap ahead. Can we turn and make good the fight--or won't
we be torn to death? It has come to this it seems: women must either be
weak, and cling so close to man that she can't be struck, keep entirely
out of the range of his fists and arms,--or develop biceps equal to his.
Jane ought to have had me in training longer, for I'm discovering that
I'm weak--of biceps.

"Are you coming--are you coming to live with us, Evelina? Are you