ith me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care how
bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without any
features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever's
happened to the outside of you, they can't change your
insides. And you're the same man that called out to me, that
day, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you a piece
of my mind climbed down off the pole, and put your face up to
be slapped, God bless the boy in you--

A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ball
was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand.

"What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice.

Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easy
and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood."

"What'm I doin' with it?"

"You've just finished painting it."

Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief moment,
struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger and amusement
he put it down on the table none too gently and stoop up, yawning a
little.

"That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in utter contrition: "Oh,
beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! I didn't--"

But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face.
She was registering joy--pure joy.

UN MORSO DOO PANG

When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy,
in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset that
Belasco himself could not have improved upon had wrung from her only a
casual tribute such as: "My! Look how red the sky is!" delivered as
unemotionally as a weather bulletin.

Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert
heap in a cotton kimono whose colour and design were libels on the
Nipponese. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her
hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where
shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no
answering radiance in the girl's face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky.

* * * * *

Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wis., Tessie Golden of the
pre-sunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the kitchen:
"Ma, what'd you do with my pink georgette waist?"

And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collar was
kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a li