till be in my nature but which I am
forgetting in these licentious habiliments, and so on! The picture had
been burned after giving the Reverend his own horrified flash of it, and
they would both pray daily that I might get up out of this degradation
and be once more a good, true woman that some pure little child would
not be ashamed to call the sacred name of mother.

"Such was Aunt Waitstill--what names them poor old girls had to stand
for! I had another aunt named Obedience, only she proved to be a regular
cinch-binder. Her name was never mentioned in the family after she slid
down a rainspout one night and eloped to marry a depraved scoundrel who
drove through there on a red wagon with tinware inside that he would
trade for old rags. I'm just telling you how times have changed in spite
of the best efforts of a sanctified ministry. I cried over that letter
at first. Then I showed it to Lysander John, who said 'Oh, hell!' being
a man of few words, so I felt better and went right on forgetting my
womanhood in that shameless garb of a so-and-so--though where aunty had
got her ideas of such I never could make out--and it got to be so much a
matter of course and I had so many things to think of besides my
womanhood that I plumb forgot the whole thing until this social upheaval
in Red Gap a few years ago.

"I got to tell you that the wild and lawless West, in all matters
relating to proper dress for ladies, is the most conservative and
hidebound section of our great land of the free and home of the
brave--if you can get by with it. Out here the women see by the Sunday
papers that it's being wore that way publicly in New York and no one
arrested for it, but they don't hardly believe it at that, and they
wouldn't show themselves in one, not if you begged them to on your
bended knees, and what is society coming to anyway? You might as well
dress like one of them barefooted dancers, only calling 'em barefooted
must be meant like sarcasm--and they'd die before they'd let a daughter
of theirs make a show of herself like that for odious beasts of men to
leer at, and so on--until a couple years later Mrs. Henrietta Templeton
Price gets a regular one and wears it down Main Street, and nothing
objectionable happens; so then they all hustle to get one--not quite so
extreme, of course, but after all, why not, since only the evil-minded
could criticise? Pretty soon they're all wearing it exactly like New
York did two years ago, with m