water dropping on your head is perfect peace!--Look close at Martha,
I say. Every night when the blowsy old moon shines like courting
time, every day when the butcher's bill comes home as big as a swollen
elephant, when the crippled stepson tries to cut his throat again,
when the youngest kid sneezes funny like his father--'WHO WAS
ROSIE? WHO WAS ROSIE?'"

"Well, who was Rosie?" persisted the Youngish Girl absent-mindedly.

"Why, Rosie was _nothing_!" snapped the Traveling Salesman; "nothing
at all--probably." Altogether in spite of himself, his voice trailed
off into a suspiciously minor key. "But all the same," he continued
more vehemently, "all the same--it's just that little darned word
'probably' that's making all the mess and bother of it--because, as
far as I can reckon, a woman can stand absolutely anything under God's
heaven that she knows; but she just up and can't stand the littlest,
teeniest, no-account sort of thing that she ain't sure of. Answers may
kill 'em dead enough, but it's questions that eats 'em alive."

For a long, speculative moment the Salesman's gold-rimmed eyes went
frowning off across the snow-covered landscape. Then he ripped off his
glasses and fogged them very gently with his breath.

"Now--I--ain't--any--saint," mused the Traveling Salesman
meditatively, "and I--ain't very much to look at, and being on the
road ain't a business that would exactly enhance my valuation in the
eyes of a lady who was actually looking out for some safe place to
bank her affections; but I've never yet reckoned on running with any
firm that didn't keep up to its advertising promises, and if a man's
courtship ain't his own particular, personal advertising