rable opportunity I get, if I die with fright the next minute,
or have to make the opportunity.

Still, I can't help wondering what does keep him so composed under the
circumstances. Surely he wouldn't refuse me, but how do I know for sure?
How does a man even know if a woman is--?

CHAPTER X

TOGETHER?

When business and love crowd each other on a man's desk he calmly puts
love in a pigeon-hole to wait for a convenient time and attends strictly
to business, while a woman takes up and coddles the tender passion and
stands business over in the corner with its face to the wall to keep it
from intruding.

Dickie has been here a whole week since the barbecue-rally, ostensibly
trying to get me down to making a few preliminary sketches for the
gardens to his C. & G. railroad stations, and, of course, I am going to
do them. I'm interested in them and I'm sensible of the honor it is to
get the chance of making them: but the moon didn't rise until after ten
o'clock last night and I'm getting nervous about that scene of sentiment
I'm planning. I can't think of gardens!

Still, I am glad he stayed and that everybody has been giving him a
party and that Nell is always there, for he hasn't had time to notice
how I'm treating business and coddling--

Jane and Polk and Nell and Caroline and Lee and everybody else,
including Sallie and the Dominie, have been all over my house all day
and into the scandalous hours of the night, which in Glendale begin at
eleven o'clock and pass the limit at twelve, and I don't see how they
stand so much of not being alone with each other. It is wearing me out.

I had positively decided on my own side steps for the scene of my
proposal to the Crag, under the honeysuckle vine that still has a few
brave and hearty blossoms to encourage me, with the harvest moon
looking on, but moons and honeysuckle blossoms wait for no man and no
woman especially. They are both fading, and I've never got the spot to
myself more than a minute at a time yet. The Crag, with absolutely no
knowledge of my intentions, except it may be a psychic one, sits there
every night and smokes and looks out at Old Harpeth and maddens me,
while some one of the others walks in and out and around and about and
sits down beside him, where I want to be.

And as for the day time, I am so busy all day long, providing for this
perpetual house-party, that I am dead to even friendship by night. Jane
is doing over Glendale from city