This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words
Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding,
exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was
afraid of stepping on her train. Was it strange she should think that?
She was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons according
to her kind and from what she knew of life. So she imagined Crozier's
wife to have been a sort of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who swept up the
dust of the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at all to the
children of nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower than their
ankles. She almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a man like
Crozier, who had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in the witness-
box as he did; who took the bullet of the assassin with such courage; who
broke a horse like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech on a filly's
flank, should crumple up at the thought of a woman who, anyhow, couldn't
be taller than Crozier himself was, and hadn't a hand like a piece of
steel and the skin of an antelope. It was enough to make a cat laugh,
or a woman cry with rage.

"Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly handsome!"
There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing woman, in
velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and overbearing, like
grey poplin. Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the mirror-the half-
length mirror on the opposite wall--and she felt her hands clench and her
bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive calico frock, a thing
for Chloe, not for Juno.

She was very angry with Crozier, for it was absurd, that look of
deprecating homage, that "Hush-she-is-coming" in his eyes. What a fool a
man was where a woman was concerned! Here she had been fighting herself
for a fortnight to conquer a useless passion for her man of all the