thors, and yet had
nothing to say but words.

Still, I enjoyed them evenings. I learned to be interested in vital
questions and to keep up with the world's best thought, in company
with these gents that was a few laps ahead of it. But not so with the
motherless chit. This here Lydia made no effort whatever to keep up with
the world's best thought. She didn't seem to care if she never perfected
her intellect. It would of been plain to any eye that she was spreading
a golden mesh for the Oswald party; yet she never made the least clumsy
effort to pander to his high ideals.

She was a wonder, that girl! All day she would set round the house,
with her hair down, fixing over a lace waist or making fudge, and not
appearing to care much about life. Come night, when the party was due to
return, she would spry up, trick herself out in something squashy, with
the fashionable streamlike effect and a pretty pair of hammock stockings
with white slippers, and become an animated porch wren. That seemed to
be the limit of her science.

Most motherless chits would of pretended a feverish interest in the
day's hunt for fossil cockroaches, and would even of gone out to chip
off rocks with a hammer; but not Lydia. She would never pretend to the
least infatuation for organic remains, and would, like as not, strike up
something frivolous on her ukulele while Oswald was right in the middle
of telling all about the secret of life. She was confident all the time,
though, like she already had him stuffed and mounted. She reminded me of
that girl in the play What Every Woman Thinks She Knows.

Lydia had great ideas of cooking, which is an art to ensnare males. She
said she was a dandy cook and could make Saratoga chips that was all to
the Kenosha--whatever that meant. Think of it--Saratoga chips! Over eight
hundred ways to cook potatoes, and all good but one; and, of course,
she'd have to hit on this only possible way to absolutely ruin potatoes.
She could cook other things, too--fudge and stuffed eggs and cheese
straws, the latter being less than no food at all. It gives you a line
on her.

I suppose it was all you could expect from a born debutante that had been
brought up to be nice to college boys on a moonlit porch, allowing them
to put another sofa pillow back of her, and wearing their class pins, and
so forth. And here she was come to thirty, with fudge and cheese straws
and the ukulele still bounding her mental horizon, yet looking f