s a lot more heart than
she can manage with the amount of brains she got with it at birth.
I'm not any star in a rose-coloured sky, and I don't want to inspire
anybody; it's too heavy an undertaking. I want to be a healthy, happy
woman and a wife to a man who can inspire himself and manage me. I want
to marry a thin man, and when I get to be thirty I want my husband to
want me to be as large as Aunt Bettie, but not let me. An inspiration
couldn't be fat, and I'm always in danger from hot cakes and chicken
gravy.

However, if I should undertake to be all the things Judge Wade said in
that letter he wanted me to be to him, I should soon be skin and bones
from mental and physical exercise. Still, he does live in Hillsboro, and
I won't let myself know how my heart aches at the thought of leaving my
home--and other things. It's up in my throat, and I seem always to be
swallowing it, the last few days.

All the men who write me letters seem to get themselves wound up into
a sky rocket and then let themselves explode in the last paragraph, and
it always upsets my nerves. I was just about to begin to cry again over
the last words of the judge, when the only bright spot in the day so far
suddenly happened. Pet Buford ran in with the pinkest cheeks and the
brightest eyes I had seen since I looked in the mirror the night of the
dance. She was in an awful hurry.

"Molly dear," she said with her words literally falling over themselves,
"Tom says you would give us some of your dinner left-overs to take for
lunch in the car, for we are going to take a run down to Hedgeland to
see some awfully fine cattle he has heard will be in the market there.
I don't want to ask mother, in case she won't let me go; and his mother,
if he asked her, will begin to talk about us. Tom said I was to come to
you, and you would understand and arrange it all quickly. He sent his
love and all sorts of other messages. Isn't he fond of a joke?" And we
kissed and laughed and packed a basket, and kissed and laughed again for
good-bye. I felt amused and happy for a few minutes--and also deserted.
It's a very good thing for a woman's conceit to find out how many of her
lovers are just make-believes. I may have needed Tom's deflection.

Anyway, I don't know when I ever was so glad to see anybody as I was
when Mrs. Johnson came in the front door. A woman who has proved to her
own satisfaction that marriage is a failure is at times a great tonic to
other women. I