ebbe the limit raised a bit here and there
by some one who makes her own. But again they're saying that the latest
one New York is wearing is so bad that it must be confined to a certain
class of women, even if they do get taken from left to right at Asbury
Park and Newport and other colonies of wealth and fashion, because the
vilest dregs can go there if they have the price, which they often do.

"Red Gap is like that. With me out here on the ranch it didn't matter
what I wore because it was mostly only men that saw me; but I can well
remember the social upheaval when our smartest young matrons and
well-known society belles flung modesty to the chinook wind and took to
divided skirts for horseback riding. My, the brazen hussies! It ain't so
many years ago. Up to that time any female over the age of nine caught
riding a horse cross-saddle would have lost her character good and
quick. And these pioneers lost any of theirs that wasn't cemented good
and hard with proved respectability. I remember hearing Jeff Tuttle tell
what he'd do to any of his womenfolks that so far forgot the sacred
names of home and mother. It was startling enough, but Jeff somehow
never done it. And if he was to hear Addie or one of the girls talking
about a side-saddle to-day he'd think she was nutty or mebbe wanting one
for the state museum. So it goes with us. My hunch is that so it will
ever go.

"The years passed, and that thrill of viciousness at wearing divided
skirts in public got all rubbed off--that thrill that every last one of
us adores to feel if only it don't get her talked about--too much--by
evil-minded gossips. Then comes this here next upheaval over riding
pants for ladies--or them that set themselves up to be such. Of course
we'd long known that the things were worn in New York and even in such
modern Babylons as Spokane and Seattle; but no woman in Red Gap had ever
forgot she had a position to keep up, until summer before last, when we
saw just how low one of our sex could fall, right out on the public
street.

"She was the wife of a botanist from some Eastern college and him and
her rode a good bit and dressed just alike in khaki things. My, the
infamies that was intimated about that poor creature! She was bony and
had plainly seen forty, very severe-featured, with scraggly hair and a
sharp nose and spectacles, and looked as if she had never had a moment
of the most innocent pleasure in all her life; but them riding pants
fix