tache. But what can
you do for him? There's nothing goin' to cure him but a letter from
her, and you can't get that. If ever a man deserved a good wife it's
that man, Seth, and what did he get? A Southern woman!"

"Those Southern women make good wives," asserted the Professor, "if
you give them plenty of servants and money. None better."

"Good fair-weather wives," nodded the Post Mistress, "but look out for
storms. That's when they desert."

"It's a sweeping assertion," mused the Professor, "and not quite fair.
It is impossible to judge them all by this weak creature, Celia
Lawson. Many a woman in Kentucky braved dangers, cold, hunger and wild
animals, living in log huts as these women live in their dugouts,
before that State was settled and civilized."

"Some won't give in that it is civilized," objected the Post
Mistress, "they're so given down there to killin' people."

"The only difference," went on the Professor, "was in the animals.
They had bears. We have buffaloes. But sometimes you come across a
woman who isn't cut out for a pioneer woman, and all the training in
the world won't make her one. It's the way with Seth's wife."

"She's not only weak and incapable," vowed the Post Mistress, "but
soulless and heartless."

"How these women love each other," the Professor commented.

"'Tain't that," flared the Post Mistress. "I'm as good a friend to a
woman as another woman can be...."

"Just so," the Professor smiled.

"It's my theory," frowned the Post Mistress, "that women should stand
by women and men by men...."

"Your Theory," mused the Professor.

"And I practice it," declared the Post Mistress. "Only in this case I
can't. Nobody could. What sort of woman is she, anyway? I can't
understand her. She's rid of him and the child and the wind and the
weather. She's back there where they say it's cool in the summer-time
and warm in the winter, where the cold blasts don't blow, and the hot
winds don't blister, and still she can't take time to sit down and
write a little note to the father of her child."

She looked away from the window and Seth to the Professor, who
wondered why it was he had never before observed the beauty of her
humid eyes.

"I can't bear to see him walking up and down," she complained,
"waitin' and waitin'. It disgusts you with woman-kind."

The wind blew the shutter to with a bang. It flung it open again. Some
twigs of a tree outside tapped at the pane. A whistle sounded.

Se