"Don't see why you shouldn't. You were plenty old enough to have
your memory in good working order if it was ever going to be,"
said Abby Simson.

"Well," said Ethel, "it is the funniest thing I ever heard of.
If a girl wanted a man enough to go all to pieces over him, and
he wanted her, why on earth didn't she take him?"

"Maybe they quarreled," ventured Mrs. Edward Lee, who was a mild,
sickly-looking woman and seldom expressed an opinion.

"Well, that might have been," agreed Abby, "although Eudora
always had the name of having a beautiful disposition."

"I have always found," said Mrs. Joseph Glynn, with an air of
wisdom, "that it is the beautiful dispositions which are the most
set the minute they get a start the wrong way. It is the
always-flying-out people who are the easiest to get on with in
the long run."

"Well," said Abby, "maybe that is so, but folks might get worn
all to a frazzle by the flying-out ones before the long run. I'd
rather take my chances with a woman like Eudora. She always seems
just so, just as calm and sweet. When the Ames's barn, that was
next to hers, burned down and the wind was her way, she just
walked in and out of her house, carrying the things she valued
most, and she looked like a picture--somehow she had got all
dressed fit to make calls--and there wasn't a muscle of her face
that seemed to move. Eudora Yates is to my mind the most
beautiful woman in this town, old or young, I don't care who she