and, like a
competent general, disposing her forces and munitions for the campaign
of the coming week. But Sunday--and a wildly rainy Sunday--had housed
her utterly.

Being one who can idle with no grace whatever she was engaged in what
she called putting the place to rights. This meant taking out the
contents of bureau drawers and wardrobes and putting them back again,
massing the litter on the big table in the living-room into an involved
geometry of neat piles that would endure for all of an hour,
straightening pictures on the walls, eliminating the home-circles of
spiders long unmolested, loudly calling upon Lew Wee, the Chinaman, who
affrightedly fled farther and farther after each call, and ever and
again booming pained surmises through the house as to what fearful state
it would get to be in if she didn't fight it to a clean finish once in a
dog's age.

The woman dumped a wastebasket of varied rubbish into the open fire,
leaned a broom against the mantel, readjusted the towel that protected
her gray hair from the dust--hair on week days exposed with never a
qualm to all manner of dust--cursed all Chinamen on land or sea with an
especial and piquant blight invoked upon the one now in hiding, then
took from the back of a chair where she had hung it the moment before a
riding skirt come to feebleness and decrepitude. She held it up before
critical eyes as one scanning the morning paper for headlines of
significance.

"Ruined!" she murmured. Even her murmur must have reached Lew Wee, how
remote soever his isle of safety. "Worn one time and all ruined up!
That's what happens for trying to get something for nothing. You'd think
women would learn. You would if you didn't know a few. Hetty Daggett,
her that was Hetty Tipton, orders this by catalogue, No. 3456 or
something, from the mail-order house in Chicago. I was down in Red Gap
when it come. 'Isn't it simply wonderful what you can get for three
thirty-eight!' says she with gleaming eyes, laying this thing out before
me. 'I don't see how they can ever do it for the money.' She found out
the next day when she rode up here in it with me and Mr. Burchell
Daggett, her husband. Nothing but ruin! Seams all busted, sleazy cloth
wore through. But Hetty just looks it over cheerfully and says: 'Oh,
well, what can you expect for three thirty-eight?' Is that like a woman
or is it like something science has not yet discovered?

"That Hetty child is sure one woman. This skirt