alling things that pink-skinned,
shiny-nailed girls were not wont to do back home. They stayed at the
Bijou, a whole crowd of them, and Connie never let them out of her
sight until they closed their bedroom doors for the night. They talked
in brief broken sentences, rather curtly, but their voices were quiet
and low, and they weren't half as slangy as cowgirls, by every literary
precedent, ought to be. They were not like Connie, of course, tall and
slim, with the fine exalted face, with soft pink palms and soft round
arms. And their striking saddle costumes were not half as curious to
Fort Morgan as Connie's lacy waists, and her tailored skirts, and her
frilly little silk gowns. But they were more curious to Connie.

She tried to picture herself in a sombrero like that, with gauntlets on
her hands, and with a fringed leather skirt that reached to her knees,
and with a scarlet silk blouse and a yellow silk belt,--and even her
distinctly literary imagination could not compass such a miracle. But
she was sure if she ever could rig herself up like that, she would look
like a dream, and she really envied the cowgirls, who leaped head first
from the saddle but always landed right side up.

People of another world, well, yes. But there are ways of getting
together.

Connie talked very little that first afternoon. She watched the people
around her, and listened as they discussed the points of the horses,
the cowgirls and the jockeys with equal impartiality. She heard their
bets, their guttural grunts of disapproval with the judges' decisions,
their roars of satisfaction when the right horse won. She watched the
cowgirls, walking unconcernedly about the ring, flapping their
riding-whips against their leather boots. She watched the lithe-limbed
cowboys slouching not ungracefully around the nervous ponies, waving
their hats in greeting to their friends, calling loud jests to their
fellows in the cowboy band. How strange they were, how startlingly
human, and yet how thousand-miles removed.

Connie rebelled against it. They were folks. And so was Connie. The
thousand miles was a barrier, an injustice. In order to handle
literary material, she must get within touching distance of it. All
those notes she had collected so painstakingly were cold, inanimate.
In order to write of folks she must touch them, feel them, must know
they lived and breathed as she did. Why couldn't she get at
them,--folks, plain folks, and