And before I could remonstrate with him he was marching down the street like a whole regiment out on a charge that was to be one of extermination, or complete surrender.

The Crag told me that evening that the Mayor's office of Glendale had reeked of brimstone, for hours, and the next Sunday Aunt Augusta sat in their pew at church, militantly alone, while he occupied a seat in the farthest limits of the amen corner, with equal militancy.

But Uncle Peter's attitude during the time of Jane's campaign for general Equality in Glendale was pathetically like that of an old log, that has been drifting comfortably down the stream of life with the tide that bore its comrades, and suddenly got its end stuck in the mud so that it was forced to stem alone the very tide it had been floating on.

Jane didn't throw any rocks at anybody's opinions or break the windows of anybody's prejudices. She had the most lovely heart to heart talks with the women separately, collectively, and in both small and large bunches. I had them in to tea in the combinations that she wanted them, and I must say that she was the loveliest thing with them that could be imagined. She was just her stiff, ugly self, starchily clad in the most beautifully tailored white linen, and they all went mad about her. The Pup and the Kit clutched at her skirts until anybody else would have been a mass of wrinkles, and the left breast of her linen blouse did always bear a slight impress of little Ned's head. The congeniality of Jane and that baby was a revelation to me and his colic ceased after the first time she kneaded it out of his fat little stomach with her long, slim, powerful hands according to a first-aid method she had learned in her settlement work, with Mamie looking on in fear and adoration. It may have been bloodless surgery but I suspect it of being partly hypnotism, because the same sort of surgery was used on the minds of all my women friends and with a like result.

The subject of the rally was a fine one for everybody to get together on from the start and, before any of them realized that they were doing anything but plan out the details of a big spread, the like of which they had been doing for hospitable generations, for the railroad Commission, they were organized into a flourishing Equality League, with officers and by-laws and a sinking fund in the treasury.

"Now, Evelina," said Jane, as she sat on the edge of my bed braiding her heavy, sleek, black braid that is as big as my wrist and that she declares is her one beauty, though she ought to know that her straight, strong-figure, ruddy complexion, aroma of strength and keen, near-sighted eyes are—well, if not beauties, something very winning, "we must not allow the men time to get sore over this matter of the League. We must make them feel immediately that they are needed and wanted intensely in the movement. They must be asked to take their place, shoulder to shoulder, with us in this fight for better conditions for the world and mankind in general. True to our theory we must offer them our comradely affection and openly and honestly express our need of them in our lives and in our activities. I was talking to Mrs. Carruthers and Nell and Mrs. Hall and Caroline, as well as your Cousin Martha, about it this afternoon and they all agreed with me that the men would have cause to be aggrieved at us about seeming thus to be organizing a life for ourselves apart from theirs, with no place in it provided for them. Mrs. Carruthers said that she had felt that the Reverend Mr. Haley had been deeply hurt already at not being masked to open any of the meetings with prayer, and she volunteered to talk to him and express for herself and us our need of him."

"That will be easy for Sallie, for she has been expressing need of people in her fife as long as she has been living it," I answered with a good-natured laugh, though I would have liked to have that interview with the Dominie myself. He is so enthusiastic that I like to bask in him once in a while.



"I asked young Mr. Hayes to take me fishing with him to-morrow in order to have a whole quiet day with him alone so that we could get closely in touch with each other. I have had very little opportunity to talk with him, but I have felt his sympathy in several interested glances we have exchanged with each other. I am looking forward to the establishment of a perfect friendship with him."

I told myself that I was mistaken in thinking that the expression in Jane's eyes was softened to the verge of dreaminess and my inmost soul shouted at the idea of Jane and Polk and their day alone in the woods.

Since that night that Polk humiliated me as completely as a man can humiliate a woman, he has looked at me like a whipped child, and I haven't looked at him at all I have used Jane as a wide-spread fan behind which to hide from him. How was I to know what was going on on the other side of the fan?

It is a relief to realize that in the world there are at least a few women like Jane that don't have to be protected from Polk and his kind. Jane is one of the hunted that has turned and has come back to meet the pursuer with outstretched and disarming hand. This, I suspect, is to be about her first real tussle; skoal to the victor!

"I advised your Aunt Augusta to ask you to talk again to your Uncle Peter, and Nell is to seek an interview with Mr. Hardin at her earliest opportunity, though I think the only result will be instruction and uplift for Nell, as a more illumined thing I never had said to me on the subject of the relation of men and women than the one he uttered to me last night, as he said good-by to me out on the porch in that glorious moonlight that seems brighter here in Glendale than I have ever seen it out in the world anywhere else."

"What did he say?" I asked perfectly naturally, though a double-bladed pain was twisted around in my solar plexus as the vision of Jane's last night interview in the moonlight with the Crag, and Nell's soon-to-be-one, hit me broadside at the same time. I haven't had one by myself with him for a week.

"Why, of course, women are the breath that men draw into their lungs of life to supply eternal combustion," was what he said when I asked him point-blank what he thought of the League. "Only let us breathe slowly as we ascend to still greater elevations with their consequent rarefied air," he added, with the most heavenly thoughtfulness in his fine face. "Did it ever occur to you, Evelina, that your Cousin James is really a radiantly beautiful man? How could you be so mistaken, as to both him and his personal appearance, as to apply such a name as Crag to him?"

Glendale is going to Jane's head!

"Don't you think he looks scraggy in that long-tailed coat, shocks of taggy hair and a collar big enough to fit Old Harpeth?" I asked deceitfully.

Why shouldn't I tell Jane what I really thought of Cousin James and discuss him broadly and frankly? I don't know! Lately I don't want to think about him or have anybody mention him in my presence. I've got a consciousness of him way off in a corner of me somewhere and I'm just brooding over it. Everybody in town has been in this house since Jane has been here, all the time, and I haven't seen him alone for ages it seems. Maybe that's why I have had to make a desert island inside myself to take him to.

"And I have been thinking since you told me of the situation in which he and Mrs. Carruthers have been placed by this financial catastrophe, how wonderful it will be if love really does come to them, when her grief is healed by time. He will rear her interesting children into women that will be invaluable to the commonwealth," Jane continued as she tied a blue bow on the end of her long black plait.

"Do you think that there—there are any signs of—of such a thing yet?" I asked with pitiful weakness as I wilted down into my pillow.

"Just a bit in his manner to her, though I may be influenced in my judgment by the evident suitability of such a solution of the situation," she answered as she settled herself back against one of the posts of my high old bed and looked me clean through and through, even unto the shores of that desert island itself.

"I hope you have been noting these different emotional situations and reactions among your friends carefully in your record, Evelina," she continued in an interested and biological tone of voice and expression of eye. "In a small community like this it is much easier to get at the real underlying motive of such things than it is in a more complicated civilization. I have seen you transcribing notes into our book. Since I have come to Glendale I am more firmly determined than ever that the attitude of emotional equality that we determined upon in the spring is the true solution of most of the complicated man-and-woman problems. I am anxious to see it tried out in five other different communities that we will select. I would not seem to be indelicate, dear, but I do not see any signs of your having been especially drawn emotionally towards any of your friends, though your attitude of sisterly comradeship and frankness with them is more beautiful than I thought it was possible for such a thing to be. You are not being tempted to shirk any of your duties of womanhood because of your interest in your art, are you? I will confess to you that the thing that brought me down upon you was your news of this commission for the series of station-gardens. I think you will probably work better after this side of your nature is at rest. Of course, a union with Mr. Hall would be ideal for you. You must consider it seriously."

The "must" in Jane's voice sounded exactly like that "must" looked in Richard's telegram, which has been enforced with others just as emphatic ever since.

There are some men who are big enough to take a woman with a wound in her heart and heal both it and her by their love. Richard is one of that kind. What could any woman want more than her work and a man like that?

After Jane had laid her strong-minded head on the hard pillow, that I had had to have concocted out of bats of cotton for her, I laid my face against my own made of the soft breast feathers of a white flock of hovering hen-mothers and wept on their softness.

A light was burning down in the lodge at the gate of Widegables. He hasn't gone back to his room to sleep, even when I have Jane's strong-mindedness in the house with me. I remember that I gave my word of honor to myself that I wouldn't try any of my modern emotional experiments on him the first night I slept in this house alone, with only him over there to keep me from dying with primitive woman fright. I shall keep my word to myself and propose to Richard if my contract with Jane and the Five seems to call for it. In the meantime if I choose to cry myself to sleep it is nobody's business.

I wonder if a mist rises up to Heaven every night from all the woman-tears in all the world, and if God sees it, as it clings damp around the hem of His garment, and smiles with such warm understanding that it vanishes in a soft glow of sleep that He sends down to us!

Jane has arisen early several mornings and spent an hour before breakfast composing a masterly and Machiavellian letter of invitation from the Equality League to the inhabitants of Glendale and the surrounding countryside to and beyond Bolivar to attend the rally given by them in honor of the C. & G. Railroad Commission on Tuesday next. It is to come out to-day in the weekly papers of Glendale, Bolivar, Hillsboro, and Providence, and I hope there will not be so many cases of heart-failure from rage that the gloom of many funerals will put out the light of the rally. I hope no man will beat any woman in the Harpeth Valley for it, and if he does, I hope he will do it so neither Jane nor I will hear of it.

It was Aunt Augusta who thought up the insulting and incendiary plan of having the rally as an offering of hospitality from the League, and I hope if Uncle Peter is going to die over it he will not have the final explosion in my presence.

Privately I spent a dollar and a half sending a night-letter to Richard all about it and asking him if the Commissioners would be willing to stand for this feminist plank in the barbecue deal. He had sent me the nicest letter of acceptance from the Board when I had written the invitation to them through him, as coming from the perfectly ladylike feminine population of Glendale, and I didn't like to get them into a woman-whirlwind without their own consent. I paid the boy at the telegraph office five dollars not to talk about the matter to a human soul, and threatened to have him dismissed if he did, so the bomb-shell was kept in until this afternoon.

Richard replied to the telegram with characteristic directness:

Delighted to be in at the fight. Seven of us rabid suffragists, two on the fence, and a half roast pig will convert the other. Found no answer to my question in letter of last Tuesday. Must!

RICHARD.

It was nice of Jane to write out and get ready her bomb-shell and then go off with Polk, so as not to see it explode. But I'm glad she did. However, I did advise her to take a copy of it along with the reels and the lunch-basket to read to him, as a starter of their day to be devoted to the establishment of a perfect friendship between them.

Polk didn't look at me even once as I helped pack them and their traps into his Hupp, but Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like Polk in his white flannels, and he and Jane made a picture of perfectly blended tailored smartness as they got ready for the break-away.

There are some men that acquire feminine obligations as rough cheviot does lint and Henrietta is one of Polk's when it comes to the fishing days. He takes her so often that she thinks she owns him and all the trout in Little Harpeth, and she landed in the midst of the picnic with her fighting clothes on.

"Where are you and her going at,—fishing?" she asked in a calmly controlled voice that both of them had heard before, and which made us quail in our boots and metaphorically duck our heads.

"Yes, we—er thought we would," he answered with an uncertainty of voice and manner that bespoke abject fear.

"I'll be d—— if you shall," came the explosion, hot and loud. "I want to go fishing with you, Polk, my own self, and she ain't no good for nothing any way. You can't take her!"

"Henrietta!" I both beseeched and commanded in one breath.

"No, she ain't no good at all," was reiterated in the stormy young voice as Henrietta caught hold of the nose of the panting Hupp and stood directly in the path of destruction, if Polk had turned the driving wheel a hair's breadth. "Uncle Peter says that she is er going to turn the devil loose in Glendale, so they won't be no more whisky and no more babies borned and men will get they noses rubbed in their plates, if they don't eat the awful truck she is er going to teach the women to cook for their husbands. An' the men won't marry no more then at all, and I'll have to be a old maid like her."

Now, why did I write weeks ago that I would like to witness an encounter between Jane and Henrietta! I didn't mean it, but I got it!

Without ruffling a hair or changing color Jane stepped out of the Hupp and faced the foe. Henrietta is a tiny scrap of a woman, intense in a wild, beautiful, almost hunted kind of way, and she is so thin that it makes my heart ache. She is being fairly crushed with the beautiful depending weight of her mother and the responsibility of the twins, and somehow she is most pathetic. I made a motion to step between her and Jane, but one look in Jane's face stopped me.

"Dear," she said, in her rich, throaty, strong voice as she looked pleadingly at the militant midget facing her. Suddenly I was that lonesome, homesick freshman by the waters of Lake Waban, with Jane's awkward young arm around me, and I stood aside to let Henrietta come into her heritage of Jane. "Don't you want to come with us?" was the soft question that followed the commanding word of endearment.

"No!" was the short, but slightly mollified answer as Henrietta dug her toes into the dust and began to look fascinated.

"I'm glad you don't want to come, because I've got some very important business to ask you to attend to for me," answered Jane, in the brisk tone of voice she uses in doing business with women, and which interests them intensely by its very novelty and flatters them by seeming to endow them with a kind of brain they didn't know they possessed. "I want you to go upstairs and get my pocketbook. Be careful, for there is over a hundred dollars in the roll of bills—Evelina will give you the key to the desk—and go down to the drug store where they keep nice little clocks and buy me the best one they have. Then please you wind it up yourself and watch it all day to see if it keeps time with the clock in your hall, and if it varies more than one minute, take it back and get another. While you are in the drug store, if you have time, won't you please select me a new tooth-brush and some nice kind of paste that you think is good? Make them show you all they have. Pay for it out of one of the bills."

"Want any good, smelly soap?" I came out of my trance of absolute admiration to hear Henrietta ask in the capable voice of a secretary to a millionaire. Her thin little face was flushed with excitement and importance, and she edged two feet nearer the charmer.

"It would be a good thing to get about a half dozen cakes, wouldn't it?" answered Jane, with slight uncertainty in her voice as if leaving the decision of the matter partly to Henrietta.

"Yes, I believe I would," Henrietta decided judicially. "The 'New Mown Hay' is what Jasper got for Petunia because he hit her too hard last week and swelled her eye. They is a perfumery that goes with it at one quarter a bottle. That makes it all cheaper."

"Exactly the thing, and we mustn't spend money unnecessarily," Jane agreed. "But I don't want to trespass on your time, Henrietta, dear," she added with the deference she would have used in speaking to the President of the Nation League or the founder of Hull House.

"No, ma'am, I'm glad to do it, and I'll go quick 'fore it gets any later in the day for me to watch the clock," answered Henrietta in stately tones that were very like Jane's and which I had never heard her employ before.

And before any of the three of us got our breath her bare little feet were flashing up my front walk.

"Help!" exclaimed Polk as he leaned back from his wheel and fanned himself with his hat. "Do you use the same methods with grown beasts that you do with cubs?" he added weakly.

"It's the same she has always used on me, only this is more dramatic. Beware!" I said with a laugh as I insisted on just one squeeze of Jane's white linen arm as she was climbing back into the car.

"That's a remarkably fine child and she should have good, dependable, business-like habits put in the place of faulty and useless ones. Her profanity will make no difference for the present and can be easily corrected. Don't interfere with her attending to my commissions, Evelina. Let's start, Mr. Hayes." And Jane settled herself calmly for the spin out Providence Road.

"All the hundred dollars all by herself, Jane?" I called after them.

"Yes," floated back positively in the wake of the Hupp.

For several hours I attended to the business of my life in a haze of meditation. If Henrietta ticks off the same number of minutes on the woman-clock from Jane's standpoint, that Jane has marked off from her own mother's, high noon is going to strike before we are ready for it.

But it was only an hour or two of high-minded communing with the future that I got the time for, before I was involved in the whirl of dust that swirled around the storm center, to darken and throw a shadow over Glendale about the time of the publication of the Glendale News, which occurs every Thursday near the hour of noon, so that all the subscribers can take that enterprising sheet home to consume while waiting for dinner, and can leave it for the women of their families to enjoy in the afternoon.

I suspect that the digestion of Jane's Equality rally invitation interfered with the digestion of much fried chicken, corn, and sweet potatoes, under the roof-trees of the town and I spent the afternoon in hearing results and keeping up the spirits of the insurgents.

Caroline came in with her head so high that she had difficulty in seeing over her very slender and aristocratic nose, with a note from Lee Greenfield which had just come to her, asking her to go with him in his car over to Hillsboro to spend the day with Tom Pollard's wife, a visit he knows she has been dying to make for two months, for she was one of Pet's bridesmaids. He made casual and dastardly mention that there would be a moon to come home by, but ignored completely the fact that Tuesday was the day on which he had been invited by the League, of which he knew she was a member, to meet and rally around the C. & G. Commission.

I helped her compose the answer, and I must say we hit Lee only in high spots. I could see she was scared to death, and so was I, but her dander was up, and I backed mine up along side it for the purpose of support. Besides I feel in my heart that that note will dynamite the rocky old situation between them into something more easily handled.

She had just gone to dispatch the missive by their negro gardener when Mamie and Sallie came clucking in. Mamie's face was pink and high-spirited, but Sallie was in one complete slump of mind and body.

"Mr. Haley has just stopped by to say that he thinks no price is too great to pay for peace, and fellowship, and good-will in a community," she said, as she dropped into a rocker and looked pensively after the retreating figure of the handsome young Dominie, who had accompanied them to the gate but wisely no farther. He didn't know that Jane had gone with Polk.

"And women to pay the price," answered Mamie, spiritedly. "I have just told Ned that as yet I do not know enough to argue the question of woman's wrongs with him, but I have learned a few of her rights. One of mine is to have him accept any invitation I am responsible for having my friends offer him, and to accompany me to the entertainment if I desire to go. I reminded him that I had not troubled him often as an escort since my marriage. He was so scared that he almost let little Ned drop out of his arms, and he got in an awful hurry to go to town, but he asked me to have his gray flannels pressed before Tuesday and to buy him a blue tie to go with a new shirt he has. I never like to spank Ned or the children, but I must say it does clear the atmosphere."

"You don't think we could put it off or—or—" Sallie faltered.

"No!" answered Mamie and I together, and as I spoke I called Jasper to set out more rockers and have Petunia get the tea-tray ready, for I saw Aunt Augusta go across the road to collect Cousin Martha and Mrs. Hargrove and the rest, while Nell whirled by in her rakish little car on her way to the Square and called that she would be back.

When Nell used a thousand dollars of her own money, left her by her grandmother, to buy that little Buick, Glendale promptly had a spell of epilepsy that lasted for days. The whole town still dodges and swears when it sees her coming, for she drives with a combination of feminine recklessness and masculine speed that is to say the least alarming. To see Aunt Augusta out for a spin with her is a delicious sight.

And it was most interesting to listen to a minute description of the composite fit thrown by the male population of Glendale, at their rally invitation, but as time was limited I finally coaxed the conversation around to the subject of the viands to be offered the lordly creatures in the way of propitiation for the insult that we were forcing them to swallow by taking matters in our own hands, and then we had a really glorious time.

I am glad I have had a year or more in Paris, months in Italy, weeks in Berlin, and a sojourn in England, just so that I can be sure myself and assure the others with authority that there are no such cooks in all the world as the women in the Harpeth Valley of Tennessee, United States of America.

The afternoon wore away on the wings of magic, and the long, purple shadows were falling across the street, a rustle of cool night wind was stirring the tree-tops and the first star was coming timidly out into the gloaming, before they all realized that it was time to hurry and scurry under roof-trees.

Lee Greenfield was waiting at the gate for Caroline.

Just as Henrietta had taken a last peep at the clock on the hall table and gone to answer Sallie's call to come and help Aunt Dilsie in the bedding of the Kitten and the Pup, Polk's Hupp stopped at the gate, and he and Jane came up the front walk in the twilight together.

She had on his flannel coat over her linen one and his expression was one of glorified and translucent daze. I didn't look at her—I felt as if I couldn't. I was scared! For a second she held me in her arms and kissed me, really—the first time she had ever done it in all my life—and then went on upstairs with a nice, cool good-night and "thank you" to Polk.

"Evelina," he said, as he handed me the empty lunch-basket and also the empty fish-bucket, the first he had ever in his life brought in from Little Harpeth, "I was right about that Hallelujah chorus being the true definition of the real woman—only they are more so. I have seen a light, and you pointed the way. Will you forgive me for being what I was—and trust me—with—with—good-night!" He was gone!

Jane's kiss had been one of revelation—to me!

For a long time I sat out there in the cool, hazy, windy autumn twilight breeze, that was heavy with the scent of luscious wild grapes and tasseled corn, fanning the flame of loneliness in me until I couldn't have stood it any longer if a tall gray figure of relief had not come up the street and called me down to my front gate.

"Hail the instigator of a bloodless revolution," laughed the Crag as I stopped myself with difficulty on the opposite side of the gate from him. "The city fathers will have to capitulate, and now for the reign of the mothers!"

"And the same old route to subjection chosen, through their stomachs to their civic hearts," I answered impudently.

Overlooking my pertness he went on:

"Mayor Shelby was at home with Mrs. Augusta for two hours after dinner and, as I came by the post-office, I heard him telling Polk in remarkably chastened, if not entirely chaste language, that it was 'better to let the women have their kick-up on a feeding proposition than on something worse,' as he classically put it."

"I know it is a great victory," I answered weakly, "but I'm too tired to glory in it. I wish I was Sallie's Puppy being trotted across Aunt Dilsie's knee, or Kit, getting a rocking in Cousin Martha's arms."

"Would any other arms do for the rocking?" came in a queer, audacious voice, with a note in it that stilled something in me and made all the world seem to be holding its breath.

"I'm tired of revoluting and it's—it's tenderness I want," I faltered in a voice that hardly seemed strong enough to get so far up out of my heart as to reach the ears of the Crag as he bent his head down close over mine. He had come on my side of the gate at the first weak little cry I had let myself make a minute or two before.



"Is this right?" he asked, as he gently took me in his arms, hollowed his shoulder for a place for my head, and leaning against the old gate he began to swing me gently to and fro, his cheek against my hair and humming Aunt Dilsie's

"Swing low sweet chariot, fer to carry me home."

It was.

I know now what I want and I am going to have it. I'll fight the whole world with naked hands for him. And I'm also going to find some way to get him with all his absurd niceties of honor intact, just because that will make him happier.

I'll begin at the beginning and some way unclasp those gourdy tendrils that Sallie has been strangling him with. I will bunch all the rest of his feminine collection and take them on my own hands. I'm going to make a Governor out of him, and then a United States Senator and finally a Supreme Judge. Help! Think of the old Mossback being a progressive, but that's my party and Jane's.

I know he is going to hate terribly to have me ask him to marry me, and I hate to hurt him so, but it is my duty to get Jane's fifty thousand dollars so the Five may be as happy as I am to-night; only there aren't five other Crags. I know it will be a life-long mortification to him to have me do it, but he lost his chance to-night grand-mothering me. Still, I did turn my lips away. I was not quite ready then—I am now.

If he wants to go on wearing clothes like that I'm going to let him, even on the Senate floor, but I can't ever stand for Cousin Jasmine to cut his hair any more. I want to do it myself, and I'm going to tell her so, and why. She and I have cried over that miniature of the lost young Confederate cousin of hers and she'll understand me.

But as I think it over—it always is best to be kind, and I believe I'll let him get through this rally—it's just four days—free and happy man.

I don't know whether to go in and wake up Jane or not. I would like to go to sleep with that kiss revelation between us, but maybe it is my duty to the Five to extract some data from her while it is fresh, on the foam. I am afraid it is going to go hard with her, but somehow I have a newborn faith in Polk that makes me feel that he will make it as easy as he can for her.

Isn't it a glorious thing to realize that neither she nor I will have to sit and be tortured by waiting to see what those men are going to do?



CHAPTER IX

DYNAMITE

When a man injures a woman's feelings by any particular course of conduct to which she objects, the maternal in her rises to the surface and she treats and forgives him as she would a naughty child,—but a man makes any kind of woman-affront into a lover's quarrel. That is what masculine Glendale has been doing to its women folks for four days, and I believe everybody has been secretly enjoying it.

As to the rally, they have stood aside with their hands in their pockets and their noses in the air, and if it hadn't been for Aunt Augusta and Nell and Jane being natural-born carpenters and draymen, we might have had to give it up and let them go on with it to their own glory.

When Nell and Jane went to see Mr. Dodd about building the long tables to serve the barbecue dinner on, he said he was too busy to do it and hadn't even any lumber to sell.

Then things happened in my back yard that it sounds like a romance to write about. Jane sent me over to borrow the Crag's team and wagon and Henrietta and Cousin Martha and any of the rest of his woman-impedimenta that I could get. He was out of town, trying a case over at Bolivar, and wouldn't get back until Monday night.

I am glad he wasn't here, for it would have gone hard with me to treat him in the manner that Jane decided it was best for all the women in Glendale to treat all the men in this crisis. It sounded sweet and cold as molasses dispenses itself to you in midwinter, and I could see it was a strain on Mamie and Caroline and Mrs. Kirkland, Nell's mother, and young Mrs. Dodd, the carpenter's wife,—the Boston girl that married him before she realized him,—to keep it up from day to day.

Besides that I'm going to be a politician's wife—though he doesn't know it yet—and I want the Crag to be away from the necessity of taking any sides in this civilized warfare. That's one reason I am such a go-between for Uncle Peter and the League, I am making votes for my man, so I consider it all right for me never to deliver any of their messages to each other as they are given to me, but to twist them into agreeability to suit myself.

Sallie said the Dominie was entirely on our side and that was why she went walking with him Sunday afternoon. All the other men were cool to him and he is so sensitive.

But to get back to the back yard. I glory in writing it and want the Five to consider it as almost sacred data, though I hope they will never have to do likewise.

Jane and Nell and Aunt Augusta took the two axes and one large hammer and tore down my back fence while I and the others loaded the planks on the wagon. Jane appointed Henrietta to sit and hold the slow old horses in case they should have got demoralized by the militant atmosphere pervading Glendale and try to bolt. I never saw any human being enjoy herself as Henrietta did, and it was worth it all just to look into her radiant countenance.

Jane took all the hard top blows to do herself and left the unloosening of the lower nails to Aunt Augusta while Nell ripped off the planks that stuck. I could almost hear Nell's long, polished finger nails go with a rip every time she jerked a particularly tough old plank into subjection, and Aunt Augusta dispensed encouraging axioms about pioneer work as she banged along behind Jane. Jane herself looked as cool as a cucumber, didn't get the least bit ruffled, and had the expression on her face that the truly normal woman has while she is hemming a baby's flannel petticoat.

And though during the day many delightful crises were precipitated, the most interesting were the expressions that devastated Polk Hayes's and Lee Greenfield's faces as they came around the side of the house to see what all that hammering was about.

"Caroline!" exclaimed Lee, in perfect agony, as he beheld the lady of his ardent, though long-restrained, affections poised across the wheel of the wagon tugging at the middle of a heavy plank which Mrs. Dodd and I were pushing up to her, while Mamie, the mother of seven, stood firmly on top of the wagon guiding it into place.

"Help!" gasped Polk, as he started to take the ax from Jane by force.

Then we all stopped while Jane quietly gurgled the molasses of the situation to them, and sent them on down the street sadder and wiser men. I thought Polk was going to cry on her shoulder before he was finally persuaded to go and leave us to our fate, and the expression on Lee's face as he looked up at torn, dirty, perspiring Caroline, with a smudge on her nose and blood on her hand from an absolutely insignificant scratch, was such as ought to have been on Ned's face as he ought to have been standing by Mamie with the asafetida bottle. That's mixed up but the Five ought to catch the point.

It took up all of Saturday afternoon and part of Monday morning, but we built those tables, thereby disciplining masculine Glendale with a severity that I didn't think could have been in us.

We all rested on Sunday, that is, ostensibly. Jane put down all sorts of things on paper that everybody had to do on Monday and on Tuesday. Henrietta sat by her in a state of trance and it did me good to see Sallie out in the hammock at Widegables taking care of both the Kit and the Pup, laboriously assisted by panting Aunt Dilsie, because Jane explained to her so beautifully that she needed a lot of Henrietta's time, that Sallie acquiesced with good-natured bewilderment. Of course, Cousin Jasmine helped her some, but she was busy aiding Cousin Martha to beat up some mysterious eggs in the kitchen—with the shutters shut because it was Sunday. It was something that takes two days to "set" and was to be the piece de resistance, after the barbecue.

Mrs. Hargrove couldn't help Sallie at all with the kiddies, either, because she was looking through all her boxes and bundles for a letter from her son, which she thought said something about favoring woman's rights, and if it is like she thinks it is, she is going to go to the barbecue and get things nice and hot instead of having them brought to her cold.

I had hoped to get a few minutes Sunday afternoon to myself so I could go up into the garret and look through one of the trunks I brought from Paris with me to see how many sets of things I have got left. I am going to need a trousseau pretty soon, and I might need it more suddenly than I expect. I don't see any reason for people's not marrying immediately when they make up their minds, and my half of ours is made up strong enough to decidedly influence rapidity in his. But then I really don't believe that the Crag would care very much about the high lights of a trousseau, and it was just as well that Nell came in to get me to help her write a letter to National Headquarters to know if she could have any kind of assignment in the Campaign for the Convention to alter the Constitution in Tennessee when it meets next winter.

"Have you made up your mind fully to go in for public life, Nell?" I asked mildly. "Some of your friends might not like it very much and—and—"

"If you mean Polk Hayes, Evelina," Nell answered with the positiveness that only a very young person can get up the courage to use, "I have forgot that I was ever influenced by his narrow-minded, primitive personality at all. If I ever love and marry it will be a man who can appreciate and further my real woman's destiny."

"Well, then, that's all right," I answered with such relief in my heart that it must have showed in my voice and face. I had worried about Nell since I could see plainly, though she hasn't told me yet, and I am sure he doesn't realize it, that Jane had decided Folk's destiny. Nell is not twenty-one yet and she will find lots of men in the world that will be fully capable of making her believe they feel that way about her destiny, until they succeed in tying her up to using it for the real utilitarian purposes they are sure such a pretty woman is created for.

It will take men in general another hundred years yet, and lots of suffering, to realize that a woman's destiny is anything but himself, and get to housekeeping with her on that basis.

Of course, I see the justice and need of perfect equality in all things between the sexes, emotional equality especially, but I hope the time will never come when men get as hungry to see their women folks as said feminists get to see them, after they have been away about four days out in the Harpeth Valley. It takes a woman's patience to stand the tug.

The Crag didn't jog into Glendale on his raw-boned old horse until one-thirty Monday night. I had been watching down Providence Road for him from my pillow ever since I put out my light at eleven, because Jane had decided that it was our duty to go to bed early so as to be as fresh as possible for the rally in the morning. She had walked to the gate with Polk at ten and hadn't come back until eleven, so, of course, she was ready to turn in. It was just foolish, primitive old convention that kept me from slipping on my slippers and dressing-gown—I've got the prettiest ones that ever came across the Atlantic, Louise de Mereton, Rue de Rivoli, Paris—and going down to the gate to see him for just a minute. That second he stood undecided in the middle of the road looking at my darkened house was agony that I'm not going to put up with very much longer.

Scientifically I feel that I'm thinking life with one lobe of my brain and breathing with one lung. Still I made myself go to sleep.

Everybody believes in God in a different kind of way, and mine satisfies me entirely. I know that the hairs of my head are numbered and that not a sparrow falls; and I don't stop at that. I feel sure that my tears are measured and my smiles are rejoiced over, and when I want a good day to come to me I ask for it and mostly get it. There never was another like the one He sent me down this morning on the first slim ray of dawn that slid over the side of Old Harpeth!

The sun was warm and jolly and hospitable from the arrival of its first rays, but the wind was deliciously cool and bracing and full of the wine of October. It came racing across the fields laden with harvest scents, blustering a bit now and then enough to bring down a shower of nuts or to make the yellow corn in the shocks in the fields rustle ominously of a winter soon to come.

The maples on the bluff were garmented in royal crimson brocaded with yellow, the buck-bushes that grew along the edges of the rocks were strung with magenta berries and regiments of tall royal purple iron weeds and yellow-plumed golden-rod were marshaled in squads and clumps for a background for the long tables.

Jane and I with Henrietta were out by the old gray moss rock at the first break of day, installing Jasper and Petunia and a few of their confreres. Jasper has always been king of all Glendale barbecue-pits and he had had them dug the day before and filled with dry hickory fires all night, and his mien was so haughty that I trembled for the slaves under his command. His basket of "yarbs" was under the side of the rock in hoodoo-like shadows and the wagons of poor, innocent, sacrificed lambs and turkeys and sucking-pigs were backed up by the largest infernal pit. Petunia was already elbow deep in a cedar tub of corn meal for the pones, and another minion was shucking late roasting-ears and washing the sweet potatoes to be packed down with the meat by eight o-clock. A wagon was to collect the baked hams and sandwiches and biscuits and confections of all variety and pedigree from the rest of the League at ten o'clock.

We didn't know it then but another wagon was already being loaded very privately in town with ice and bottles, glasses and lemons and mint and kegs and schooners. I am awfully glad that the Equality League had forgotten all about the wetting up of the rally, because I don't believe we would have been equal to the situation with Aunt Augusta and Jane both prohibition enthusiasts, but it did so promote the sentiment of peace and good cheer during the day for us to all feel that the men had not failed us in a crisis, as well as in the natural qualities inherent in their offering for the feast. There was a whole case of Uncle Peter's private stock. Could human nature have done better than that?

But if we did forget to provide the liquids, I am glad we had the foresight to provide other viands enough to feed a regiment, because a whole army came.

"Evelina," gasped Jane, as we stood on the edge of the bluff that commands a view of almost all the Harpeth Valley stretched out like the very garden of Eden itself, crossed by silver creeks, lined with broad roads and mantled in the richness of the harvest haze, "can all those wagons full of people be coming to accept our invitation?"

"Yes, they're our guests," I answered, with the elation of generations of rally-givers rising in my breast, as I saw the stream of wagons and carriages and buggies, with now and then a motor-car, all approaching Glendale from all points of the compass.

"Have we enough to feed them. Jasper?" she turned and asked in still further alarm.

"Nothing never give out in Glendale yit, since we took the cover offen the pits for Old Hickory in my granddad's time," he answered, with a trace of offense in his voice, as he stood over a half tub of butter mixing in his yarbs with mutterings that sounded like incantations. I drew Jane away for I felt that it was no time to disturb him, when the basting of his baked meats was just about to begin.

I was glad that about all the countryside had gathered, unhitched their wagons, picketed their horses, and got down to the enjoyment of the day before the motor-cars bringing the distinguished guests had even started from Bolivar. It was great to watch the farmers slap neighbors on the back, exchange news and tobacco plugs, while the rosy women folks grouped and ungrouped in radiant good cheer with children squirming and tangling over and under and around the rejoicings.

"This, Evelina," remarked Jane, with controlled emotion in her voice and a mist in her eyes behind their glasses, "is not only the bone and sinew but also the rich red blood in the arteries of our nation. I feel humbled and honored at being permitted to go among them."

And the sight of dear old Jane "mixing" with those Harpeth Valley farmer folk was one of the things I have put aside to remember for always. They all knew me, of course, and I was a bit teary at their greetings. Big motherly women took me in their arms and younger ones laid their babies in my arms and laughed and cried over me, while every few minutes some rugged old farmer would call out for Colonel Shelby's "little gal" and look searchingly in my face for the likeness to my fire-eating, old Confederate, politician father.

But it was Jane that took them by storm and kept them, too, through the crisis of the day. Jane is the reveille the Harpeth Valley has been waiting for for fifty years. I thought I was, but Jane is it.

And it was into an atmosphere of almost hilarious enjoyment that the distinguished Commission arrived a few minutes before noon, just as Jasper's barbecue-pits were beginning to send forth absolutely maddening aromas.

Nell whirled up the hill first and turned her Buick across the road by the bluff with that rakish skill of hers that always sends my heart into my throat. And whom did she have sitting at her blue, embroidered linen elbow but Richard Hall himself? Good old big, strong dandy Dickie, how great it was to see him again, and if I had had my own heart in my breast it would have leaped with delight at the sight of him! But even the Crag's that I had exchanged mine for, though it was an entire stranger to Dickie, beat fast enough in sympathy with the dance in my eyes to send the color up to my face in good fashion as I hurried across a clump of golden-rod to meet him.

"Evelina, the Lovely!" he exclaimed in his big booming voice, as he took me by both shoulders and shook me instead of shaking merely my hand.

"Richard the Royal!" I answered in our old Quartier Latin form of greeting. I didn't look right into his eyes as I always had, however, and something sent a keen pain through the exchanged heart in my breast at the thought that I might be obliged to hurt the dandy old dear.

But suddenly the sight of Nell's loveliness cheered me. She had had Dick in that car with her ever since nine o'clock, almost three hours, showing him the sights of that teeming heavy lush harvest countryside around Bolivar and Glendale, all over which are low-roofed old country houses which brood over families that cluster around the unit that one man and a woman make in their commonwealth. Nell's eyes were sweet as she looked at him. I'll wait and see if I need to worry over him. With the fervor I felt I had a right to, I then avoided the issue of Richard's eyes, put it up to God and Nell, and introduced him to Jane.

And while the three of them stood waiting for Nell to back up the Buick and put her spark-plug in her pocket,—only Richard calmly took it and put it in his,—the rest of the cars came up the hill and turned into the edge of the golden-rod.

Aunt Augusta was in the first one with the Chairman of the Commission, whose name even would have paralyzed anybody but Aunt Augusta; and Mamie and Cousin Martha, Caroline and several more of the ladies made up the rest of the Committee who had gone to escort the distinguished guests to the rally.

The Crag was in the last car with a perfectly delicious old gray-haired edition of Dickie, and I almost fell on both their necks at once. What saved them was Polk appearing between us with three long mint-topped glasses.

I'm glad old Dick immediately had his eyebrows well tangled in the mint of his julep, for I got my own eyes farther down into Cousin James's deep gray ones than I expected and it was hard to come up. I hadn't had a plunge in them for three days and I went pretty deep.

"Eve!" he said softly, as he raised his glass and smiled across his green tuft.

Yes, I know he knows that I know, there is an answer to that name when he says it that way, but I'm not going to give it until I am ready and the place is romantically secluded enough to suit me. He just dares me when he says it to me before other people. That reminds me, the harvest moon is full to-night and rises an hour later every evening from now on. I don't want to wait another month before I propose to him. I've always chosen moonlight for that catastrophe of my life. I wonder if men have as good times planning the culmination of their suits as I am having with mine?

But I had to come down quickly to a little thing like the rally and give the signal to feed all the five hundred people, who by that time were nice, polite, ravening wolves, for Jasper had uncovered the turkey-pit to keep them from getting too brown while the lambs caught up with them.

Jane was the master of ceremonies, because I balked at the last minute. I think I would be capable of managing even a National Convention in Chicago—that far away from the Harpeth Valley,—but I couldn't do it with my friends of pioneer generations looking on. A man or woman never grows up at all to the woman who has knitted baby socks for them or the man who has let them ride down the hill on the front of his saddle.

And at the head of the center table Jane asked the Crag to sit beside her, so that he would be in place to command attention for her when she wanted to speak, and where everybody could hear him when he did.

And while the table was piled high and emptied, and piled high again, so many bouquets of oratory were culled, tied, and cast at the guests along the table that I believe they would have been obliged to pay exclusive attention to them if the things to eat had not been just as odoriferous and substantial. Before dinner was over everybody had spoken that was of a suitable age, and some that had heretofore in the Harpeth Valley been considered of an unsuitable sex.

Jane's speech of welcome made such an impression that it is no wonder some of the old mothers in Israel got up to iterate it, as the dinner progressed.

She, as usual, refrained from prejudice-smashing and stones-at-glass-houses throwing, and she hadn't said ten sentences before she had the whole feeding multitude with her.

She began on the way our pioneer mothers had to contrive to keep larders stocked and good things ready for the households, and she tickled the palate of every man present by mentioning every achievement in a culinary way that every woman of his household had made in all the generations that had gone over Harpeth Valley. She called all the concoctions by their right names, too, and she always gave the name of the originator, who was some dear old lady that was sleeping in the Greenwood at the foot of the hill, or in some grave over at Providence or Hillsboro or Bolivar, and who was grandmother or great-grandmother to a hundred or more of the guests. I had wondered why Jane had been poring over that old autograph manuscript receipt book in my desk for days, and as she paid these modern resurrecting compliments to the long gone cooks, tears and laughed literally deluged the table.

And as she built up, achievement by achievement, the domestic woman-history of the valley, Jane showed in the most insidious way possible how the pioneer women had been really the warp on which had been woven the woof of the whole history of their part of the Nation, political, financial, and religious. I never heard anything like it in all my life, and as I looked down those long tables at those aroused, tense, farmer faces, I knew Jane had cracked the geological crust of the Harpeth Valley, and built a brake that would stop any whirlwind on the woman-question that might attempt to come in on us over the Ridge from the outside world. They saw her point and were hard hit. When "Votes for Women" gets to coming down Providence Road the farmers will hitch up a wagon and take mother and the children with a well-packed lunch basket to meet it half way. This is a prophecy!

Then, after Jane sat down, I don't believe such a speechifying ever was before as resounded out over the river, even in the time of Old Hickory. Everybody had something to say and got to his feet to say it well, even if some of them did brandish a turkey wing or a Iamb rib to emphasize their points.

And the women were the funniest things I ever beheld, as we were treated to one maiden speech after another, issuing from the lips of plump matrons anywhere from thirty to sixty. They had never done it before, but liked it after they had tried.

Mother Mayberry from Providence, who is the grand old woman of the whole valley, having established her claim to the title thirty years ago by taking up her dead doctor husband's practice and "riding saddlebags to suffering ever since," as she puts it, broke the feminine ice by rising from her seat by the side of one of the entranced Magnates,—who had been so delighted with her and her philosophies that he could hardly do his dinner justice,—and addressing the rally in her wonderful old voice with her white curls flying and her cheeks as pink as a girl's.

"Children," she said, after everybody had clapped and clapped so she couldn't get a start for several minutes, "The Harpeth Valley women have been a-marching along behind the men for many a day, because their strong shoulders had to break undergrowth for both, but now husbands and fathers and sons have got their feet up on the bluff of Paradise Ridge, and it does look like they will be a-reaching down their hands to help us up, in the break of a new day, to stand by their side; and I, for one, say mount!—I'm ready!"

A perfect war of applause answered her, and Dickie's father got up to go down the whole length of the table to shake hands with her, but had to wait until she came out of the embrace of Nell's fluffy arms, and got a hand free from the Magnate on one side and Aunt Augusta on the other.

Even Sallie began to look speechful, and I believe she would have got up and spoken a few words on the subject of women, and how they need men to look after them, but she said something to Mr. Haley, who shook his head and then got up and prosed beautifully to us for ten minutes, and would have gone on longer, if he hadn't seen Henrietta begin to look mutinous.

The feast had begun at one o'clock, but by Jasper's skilful maneuvering of one gorgeous viand after the other, into the right place, by having relays of pones browned to the right turn and potatoes at the proper bursting point, it had been prolonged until the shadows of late afternoon were beginning to turn purple.

"Don't nobody ever leave one of my barbecue tables until sundown begins to tetch up the empty bones," has been his boast for years. And as he had cleared away the last scrap from the last table, he leaned against a tree, exhausted and triumphant, with alert, adoring eyes fixed on the Crag, who had risen in his place at the head of the long central table.

I had felt entirely too far away from him down at the other end with one of the junior Magnates and Dickie, but I was glad then that I sat so I could look straight into his face as the light from across the Harpeth Valley illumined it without, while a wonderful glow lit it from within.

All of the others had spoken of the achievements of their families and forefathers and vaunted the human history of the valley, but he spoke of the great hill-rimmed Earth Pocket itself. He gave the Earth credit for the crops that she had yielded up for her children's sustenance. He described how she had bred forest kings for the building of their homes, granted stores of fuel from her mines for their warming, and nourished great white cotton patches and flocks of sheep to clothe them from frosts and winds.

And as he spoke in a powerful voice that intoned up in the tree-tops like a great deep bell, he turned and looked out over the valley with an expression like what must have been on Moses's face when he saw into the promised land.



"She's our Mother," he said, as he flung back the long lock from across his forehead and stretched out his strong arm and slender hand towards the sun that was dropping fast down to the rim of Old Harpeth. "She has bared her breasts to suckle us, covered us from sun and snow, and now she expects something from us. If she has built us strong and ready, then we are to answer when the world has need of us and her storehouses and mines. We are to give out her invitations and welcome all who are hungry and who come a-seeking. Gentlemen, her wealth and her fertility are yours—and her beauty!"

For a long, long minute every face in the assembly was turned to the setting sun, and a perfect glory rose from the valley and burned the call of its grandeur into their eyes. We seemed to be looking across fields and forests and streams to the dim purple hills that might be the ramparts of the Holy City itself, while just below us lay the little quiet village of the dead whose souls must just have gone before.

And after that everybody rose with one accord and began to hurry to start out upon the long roads homeward, just as the great yellow moon rose in the east to balance the red old sun that was sinking in the west. Only the Magnate sat still in his place for several long minutes looking out across to Old Harpeth, and I wondered whether he was thinking about the Eternal City or how many rails it was going to take to span the valley at his feet.

And I—I just stood on the edge of the bluff by myself and let my soul lift up its wings of rejoicing that my Crag had got his beautiful desire for apostrophizing the Mother-Valley so all the world might hear. And then suddenly it came over me in a great warm, uplifting, awe-inspiring rush that a woman who takes on herself voluntarily the responsibility of marrying a poet and an orator and a mystic, who is the complete edition of a Mossback that all those qualities imply, must square her shoulders for a long, steady, pioneer march through a strange country.

Could such achievement be for me?

"Please God!" I prayed right across into the sunset, "make me a full cup that never fails him!"

I don't know how long I stood talking with God that way about my man, but when I turned and looked back under the maples everybody was gone, and I could hear the last rattle and whirl going down the hill. For a second I felt that there was nobody but Him and me left on the hill, but even in that second my heart knew better.

"Now?" I questioned myself softly, out over to the yellow moon that had at last languidly and gracefully risen, putting the finishing touch to the scene I had been planning for my proposal.

"Evelina," said the Crag quietly from where he stood leaning against the tallest maple, "shall we stay here forever and ever, or hurry down through the cemetery by the short cut to the station to say good-by to the railroaders as they expect us to do?"

Nobody ever had a better opening than that, and I ought to have said, "Be mine, be mine," with some sort of personal variation of the theme, and have clapped him to my breast and been happy ever after. That is what a courageous man would have done under the circumstances, with an opportunity like that, but I got the worst kind of scare I ever experienced, and answered:

"How much time have we got? Do you think we can make it?"

"Plenty," he answered comfortably as I began to quicken my pace to the little gate that leads between the hedge into the little half-acre of those who rest. Then as I tried to pass him, he caught my hand and made me walk in the narrow path close at his side.



Now even a very strong-minded woman, who had to go through a little graveyard with moonlight making the tombstones glower out from deep shadows of cedar trees, in the depths of which strange birds croak, while the wind rustles the dry leaves into piles as they fall, wouldn't feel like honorably proposing to the man she intended to marry, even if she was scrouged so close to his arm that it was difficult for both of them to walk, would she?

I excuse myself this time, but I must hold myself to the same standard that I want to hold Lee Greenfield to. How do I know that he hasn't had all sorts of cold, creepy feeling's keeping him from proposing to Caroline?

I hereby promise myself that I will ask Cousin James to marry me the next favorable 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 limits to the river, and I have to spend my time keeping the dear town from finding out what is being done to it.

She is hunting out everybody's pet idea or ideal for some sort of change or improvement to his, especially his, native town, and then leading him gently up to accomplishing it so that he will think he has done it entirely by himself, but will tell the next man he meets that there is nothing in the world like a tine energetic woman with good horse sense. In fact, Jane is courting the entire male population in a most scandalous fashion, and they'll be won before they know it.

"Now, that Confederate monument ought to have been built long ago out of that boulder from the river instead of hauling in a slicked-up granite slab that would er made the Glendale volunteers of '61 feel uncomfortable like they would do in the beds in the city hotels. Great idea of mine and that Yankee girl's—great idea—hey?" sputtered Uncle Peter, after Jane had spent the evening down with him and Aunt Augusta.

"It is a fine idea, Uncle Peter," I agreed with a concealed giggle.

"I've subscribed the first five dollars of the fifty for hauling, setting up and inscribing it, and we are going to let the women give half of it out of the egg-money they have got in that Equality Quilting Society—some kind of horse sense epidemic has broken out in this town, horse sense, Evelina, hey?" And he went on down the street perfectly delighted at having at last accomplished his pet scheme. He thought of it as exclusively his own by now, of course.

And the monument is just the beginning of what is going to begin in Glendale. Jane says so.

"There could be no better place than this rural community to try out a number of theories I have had in political economy as related to the activities of women, Evelina," she said to me to-day, looking at me in a benign and slightly confused way from behind her glasses. "Mr. Hayes and I were just talking some of them over to-night, and he seems so interested in seeing me institute some of the most important ones. How could you have ever thought such a man as he is lacking in seriousness of purpose, dear?"

"I feel sure that it was just my own frivolous streak that called out the frivolous in Polk, Jane dear," I answered with trepidation, hoping and praying that the inquisition would not go much further, and trying to remember just what I had written her about Polk.

"It may have been that," Jane answered, in a most naively relieved tone of voice. "But you don't know how happy I am, dear, to see that that streak is only an occasional charming vein that shows in you, but that you are now settling down steadily to your profession. I feel sure that when these garden drawings are done, you and Mr. Hall will have found your correct places in each other's lives and it will be just a glorious example of how superbly a man and woman can work together at the same profession. Mr. Hardin and I were talking about it just last night out on the side porch, and though he said very little I could see how gratified he was at the honors that had come to you and how much he likes Mr. Hall."

That settled it, and I made up my mind that when the Harvest Lady left us to-night to sink behind Old Harpeth, she wasn't going to leave me weakly lonesome. She doesn't set until two o'clock, and I'm going to take all the time I need.

And as serious and solemn as I feel over taking such a step for two as I am deciding on, I can't help looking forward to scribbling a terse and impersonal account of my having proposed to the man of my choice in this strong-minded book, adding a few words of sage advice for the Five, locking it and handing it, key and all, to Jane with a dramatic demand that she put her hundred thousand dollars in the Trust Company and begin to choose the Five from those she has had in mind.

Then before she has had time to read it, I am going to sneakily get it back and blot or tear out some of the things I have written. I can decide later what will be data and what will be dangerous to the cause.

"And you will be glad to have me—come and live for a time in your home life, dear?" Jane recalled me to the question in hand by saying wistfully. "I feel that I have never had such good friends before, anywhere, as these of yours are to me, Evelina," she added.

That's one time I got Jane completely in my arms and showed her what a really good hugging means south of Mason and Dixon's line. From later developments I am glad she had that slight initiation. It must have been serviceable to her New England disposition.

Then just as I was going to ask some of the plans she—and Polk—had made, over came Cousin Jasmine, with Cousin Annie and Mary, with Mrs. Hargrove puffing along behind them. They had come to see Jane, but I was allowed to stay and have my breath knocked out by their mission.

It seems Jane had got a great big book from some firm in New York that tells alt about herb-growing, and how difficult it is to get the ones needed for condiments and perfumes, and offering to buy first-class lavender and thyme and bergamot and sweet fern and things of that kind in any quantities at a good price. She had shown it to the little old ladies who had been secretly grieving at the separation from their garden out on their poorly rented farm, and the leaven had worked—on Mrs. Hargrove also. They go back to the farm and she with them! She had decided on raising mint to both dry and ship fresh, because he of the gay pajamas always liked to have it strong and fresh for the julep of his ancestors. I hope she won't forget to take that pattern of Japanese extraction with her and make some for the Crag now and then, for it will save my time. Horrors!

"We have fully decided on our course of action, Jane, and Evelina, dears," said Cousin Jasmine in a positive little manner that she would have been as incapable of a month ago, as is a pet kitten of barking at the family dog, "but we do so dread to break it to dear James, because we feel that he may think we are not happy under his roof and be distressed. Do you believe we shall be able to make him see that we must pursue our independent life, though always needing the support of his affection and interest?"

"I believe you will, Cousin Jasmine," I said, wanting to both laugh and cry to see the Crag's burdens begin to roll off his shoulders like this. And the tears that didn't rise would have been real ones, too, for I found that, down in the corner of my heart, I had adored the picture of my oak with the tender little old vines clinging around him. It was the producing gourd I had most objected to and I couldn't see but she would be there until I unclasped her tendrils.

But I was forgetting that, in the modern theory of thought-waves, it is the simplest minds that get the ripples first and hardest. Sallie came over just as soon as the other delegation had got home to take the twins off her hands. Jane had gone upstairs to make more calculations on our reconstruction, and I was trying to get a large deep breath.

"Evelina." she said, as she sank in a chair near me and fastened her large, very young-in-soul, eyes on mine, "were you just joking Nell, or did you mean it, when you said the other day that you thought it would be cowardly of a woman not to show a man that she loved him, if he for any reason was not willing to make the first advances to her?" Sallie is perfectly lovely in the faint lavender and pink things that Jane made her decide to get in one conversation, whereas while Nell and Caroline and I had been looking up and bringing her surreptitious samples of all colors from the store all summer.

"Well, I don't know that I exactly meant Nell to take it all to heart," I answered without the slightest suspicion of what was coming. "But I do think, Sallie, it would be no more than honest, fearless, and within a woman's own greater rights."

"Mr. Haley was saying the other evening that a woman's sweet dependence was a man's most precious heritage," Sallie gently mused out on the atmosphere that was beginning to be pretty highly charged.

"Doesn't a woman have to depend on her husband's tenderness and care all of the time—time she is bearing a child, Sallie, even up to the asafoetida spoon crisis?" I asked with my cheeks in a flame but determined to stand my ground. "It does seem to me that nature puts her in a position to demand so much support from him in those times that she ought to rely on herself when she can. Especially as she is likely to bring an indefinite number of such crises into their joint existence."

Sallie laughed, for she remembered the high horse I had mounted on the subject of Mamie and Ned Hall the day after the Assembly dance.

And as I laughed suddenly a picture I had seen down at the Hall's flashed across my mind. I had gone down to tell Mamie something Aunt Augusta wanted her to propose next day at a meeting of the Equality League about drinking water in the public school building. Mamie has learned to make, with pink cheeks and shining eyes, the quaintest little speeches that always carry the house—and even made one at a public meeting when we invited the men to hand over our fifty dollars for the monument. Ned's face was a picture as he held a ruffle of her muslin gown between his fingers while she stood up to do it.

But the picture that flashed through my mind was dearer than that and I put it away in that jewel-box that I am going to open some day for my own man.

Both Mamie's nurse and cook had gone to the third funeral of the season and Mamie was feeding the entire family in the back yard. The kiddies were sitting in a row along the top of the back steps, eating cookies and milk, with bibs around their necks,—from the twelve year old Jennie, who had tied on hers for fun, down to the chubby-kins next to the baby,—and Mamie was sitting flat on the grass in front of them nursing little Ned, with big Ned sitting beside her with his arm around both her and the baby. He was looking first down into her face, and then at the industrious kiddie getting his supper from the maternal fount, and then at the handsome bunch on the steps, as he alternately munched a bite of his cookie and fed Mamie one, to the delight of the children. The expression on his face as he looked at them, and her, and ate and laughed, is what is back of all that goes to make the American nation the greatest on earth. Amen!

"Sallie," I said, as I reached out and took her plump white hand in mine, "our men are the most wonderful in the world and they are ours any way we get them. They don't care how it is done, and neither do we, just so we belong in the right way."

"Then you don't think it would be any harm for me to tell Mr. Haley I think I could live on eighteen hundred dollars a year, until he gets sent to a larger church?" was the bomb that, thus encouraged, Sallie exploded in my face.

I'm awfully glad that I didn't get a chance to answer, for I don't want to be responsible for the future failure or success of Mr. Haley's ministry. Just then Henrietta burst into the room with the Kitten in her arms.

"Keep her for me, Evelina, please, ma'am," she said, with the dearest little chuckle, but not forgetting the polite "please," which Jane had had to suggest to her just once. What you've done for that wayward unmanageable genius of a child, Jane dear, makes you deserve ten of your own. That is—help!

"Cousin Augusta and Nell and Dickie and me is a going out to watch the man put the dyn'mite in the hole to blow the creek right up and Glendale, too, so they can see if they is enough clean water to put in the waterworks," she continued to explain. "Nell is a-going to take Dickie in her car, and Cousin Augusta is a-going to take me and Uncle Peter in her buggy. Dilsie have got the Kit and Cousin Marfy is a-watching to see she don't do nothing wrong with her. Oh, may I go, Sallie? Jane said I must always ask you."

"Yes, dearest," answered Sallie, immensely flattered by the deference thus paid her.

"How wonderful an influence the little talks Mr. Haley has had with Henrietta have had on her," she said, with such a happy glow on her face as the reformed one departed that I succeeded in suppressing the laugh that rose in me at the memory of Henrietta's account of the first one of the series.

Men need not fear that the time will ever come when they will cease to get the credit for making Earth's wheels go around, from the female inhabitants thereof. So I smiled to myself and buried my face in the fragrance under the bubbly Puppy girl's chin and coaxed her arms to clasp around my neck.

They are the holy throb of a woman's life—babies. Less than ten wouldn't satisfy me unless well scattered in ages, Jane. On some questions I am not modern.

"Still I do feel so miserable leaving Cousin James so alone all winter," Sallie continued with the most beautiful sympathy in her voice, as she looked out of the window towards Widegables. "I wonder if I ought to make up my mind to stay with him? He loves the children so, and you know the plans of Cousin Jasmine and the others to go back to their farm."

"But he'll have his mother left," I said quietly but very encouragingly. I seemed to see the little green tendril that had unclasped from the oak turning on its stem and winding tight again.

"Miss Mathers was encouraging Cousin Martha to go to Colorado to see Elizabeth and her family for a long visit this winter. She hasn't seen Elizabeth since her mother died and she was so much interested in the easy way of traveling these days, as Miss Mathers described it, that she asked her to write for a time-table and what a ticket costs, just this morning. I really ought not to desert Cousin James."

"But think how lonely Mr. Haley is down in the parsonage and of his influence on Henrietta," I urged.

"Yes, I do feel drawn in both ways," sighed the poor tender gourd. "And then you will be here by yourself, so you can watch over Cousin James, as much as your work will allow you, can't you, Evelina?"

"Yes, I'll try to keep him from being too much alone," I answered with the most deceitful unconcern.

"I see him coming to supper and I must go, for I want to be with him all I can, if I am to leave him so soon. I may not make up my mind to it," with which threat Sallie departed and left me alone in the gloaming, a situation which seems to be becoming chronic with me now.

If I had it, I'd give another hundred thousand dollars to the cause, to hear that interview between Sallie and the Dominie. I wager he'll never know what happened and would swear it didn't, if confronted with a witness.

And also I felt so nervous with all this asking-in-marriage surging in the atmosphere that it was with difficulty that I sat through supper and listened to Jane and Polk, who had come in with her, plan town sewerage. To-morrow night I knew the moon wouldn't rise until eleven o'clock, and how did I know anyway that Sallie's emancipation might not get started on the wrong track and run into my Crag? His chivalry would never let him refuse a woman who proposed to him and he'll be in danger until I can do it and tell the town about it.

Jane and Polk had promised Dickie and Nell to motor down Providence Road as far as Cloverbend in the moonlight, and I think Caroline and Lee were going too. Polk looked positively agonized with embarrassed sorrow at leaving me all alone, and it was with difficulty that I got them off. I pleaded the greatest fatigue and my impatience amounted to crossness.

After they had gone I dismissed Jasper and Petunia and locked the back doors, put out all the lights in the house and retired to the side steps, determined to be invisible no matter who called—and wait!

And for one mortal hour there I sat alone in that waning old moonlight, that grew colder and paler by the minute, while the stiff breeze that poured down from Old Harpeth began to be vicious and icy as it nipped my ears and hands and nose and sent a chill down to my very toes.

Nobody came and there I sat!

Finally, with the tears tangling icily in my lashes, I got up and went into the house and lighted the fat pine under the logs in the hall. They had lain all ready for the torch for a whole year, just as I had lain for a lifetime until a few weeks ago. Then suddenly they blazed—as I had done.

My condition was pitiable. I felt that all nature had deserted me, the climate, Indian summer, the harvest moon and my own charm, but my head was up and I was going to crackle pluckily along to my blaze, so I turned towards the door to go across the road and put my fate to the test, even if I took pneumonia standing begging at his front door. I hoped I would find him in the lodge and—

"Evelina," he exclaimed as he burst open my door, flung himself into the firelight and seized my arm like a robber baron of the Twelfth Century, making a grab for his lady-love in the midst of her hostile kindred, "I thought I would never get here! I ran all the way up from the office. Here's a telegram from Mr. Hall that says that the two roads have merged and will take the bluff route past Glendale, and give us the shops,—and wants to appoint me the General Attorney for the Southern Section. They want me to come on to New York by the first train. Can you marry me in the morning so we can take the noon express from Bolivar? I won't go without you. Please, dear, please," and as he stood and looked at me in the firelight, all the relief and excitement over his news died out of his lovely eyes and just the want of me filled them from their very depths.

For several interminable centuries of time I stood perfectly still and looked into them daringly, drinking my fill for the first time and offering him a like cup in my own.

"Eve," he said so softly that I doubt if he really spoke the word.

"Adam!" I let myself go, and at last pressed my answer against his lips as he folded me tight and safe.

It must have been some time after, I am sure I don't know how long, but I was most beautifully adjusted against his shoulder and he had my hand pressed to his cheek, when the awfulness of what had happened brought me straight up on my own feet and almost out of his arms.

"Oh, how could you have done it!" I fairly wailed, as I thought of what this awful complication was going to lose for the Five to whom I felt more tender in that second than I had ever felt before.

"Done what?" he demanded in alarm, pressing both my hands against his breast and drawing me towards him again.

"Asked me to marry you when I—"

"I have been fighting desperately to see some way to offer myself and all my impedimenta to you all this time, and this has made it all right, don't you see, dear?" he interrupted me to say, as he took possession of me again and held me with a tender fierceness, which had more of suffering in it than passion. "I have always wanted you, Eve, since before you went away, but it didn't seem right to ask you to come into a life so encumbered as mine was. Poverty made it seem impossible, but now, if you will be just a little patient with them all, I can arrange—"

"I was going to arrange all that my own self, and now just see what you have done to me and a whole lot of other women, besides making me miserable all summer," and crowded so close under his chin that he couldn't see my face, I told him all about the tinder-box Jane had loaded and then set me on the lid to see that it exploded.

I had just worked myself up to the point of how my incendiary mission was about to touch off all the other love affairs in town, when he began to shake so with disrespectful laughter that I felt that my dignity was about to demand that I withdraw coldly from his arms, where I had just got so warm and comfortable and at home; but with the first slight intimation of my intention, which was conveyed by a very feeble indeed loosening of my arms from around his Henry Clay collar, he held me firmly against him and controlled his unseemly mirth, only I could still feel it convulsing his left lung,—though as I had no business being near enough to notice it, I felt it only fair not to.

"Please don't worry about those other Five dear women," he begged, in the nicest and most considerate voice possible so that I tightened my arms again as I listened. "If Miss Mathers doesn't feel justified in giving up the dowries by your—your failure to prove the proposition, we can just invite them all down here and in Glendale and Bolivar and Hillsboro and Providence, to say nothing of the countryside, we can plant them all cozily. I can delicately explain to their choices exactly how to let them manage circumstances like—" he illustrated his scheme just here until it took time for me to get breath to listen to the rest of his apology—"this and there is no telling, with such a start as the cult has got in the Harpeth Valley already, how far ft will spread. Please forgive me, dear!"

"Yes," I answered doubtfully. Then I raised my head and looked him full in the face as I made my declaration calmly but with the perfect conviction that I still have and always will have, world without end. "Yes, but don't you think for one minute I don't know that what Jane and I and all the most advanced women in the world are trying for is the right and just and the only way for men and women to come logically into the kind of heritage you and I have stumbled into. Absolute freedom and equality between all human beings is going to be the price of Kingdom Come. I shall always be humiliated that I got scared out in the graveyard and didn't do it to you. It is going to be the regret of my life."

"Truly, I'm sorry, sweetheart," he answered most contritely. "If I were to take my hat and go back to the gate and come in again properly and let you do it, would that make you feel any better?"

"No, it wouldn't," I answered quickly because why should I be separated from him all the two and a half minutes it would take to play out that farce, when I have been separated from him all the twenty-five years that stretch from now back until the day of my birth? "I am going to bear it bravely and hold up my head and tell Jane—"

"I wouldn't bother to hold up my head to tell her, Evelina," came from the doorway in Polk's delighted drawl as he and Jane stepped into the room. "Pretty comfortably placed, that head, I should say."

"Oh, Jane!" I positively wailed as I extracted myself from the Crag's gray arms and buried myself in Jane's white serge ones that opened to receive me. And the seconds that I rested silently there Polk spent in shaking both of the Crag's hands and pounding him on the back so that I grew alarmed.

"I didn't do it, Jane, I didn't do it," I almost sobbed with fear of what her disappointment was going to be. "He beat me to it!"

"Truly. I'm sorry," Cousin James added to my apology as he stood with his arm on Polk's shoulder.

"I dare you, dare, you to tell 'em, Jane," Polk suddenly said, coming over and putting a hand on one of my shoulders and one on Jane's.

"Evelina and Mr. Hardin," Jane answered gallantly with her head assuming its lovely independent pose, but with the most wonderful blush spreading the beauty that always ought to have been hers all over her one-time plain face, "the wager stands as won by Evelina Shelby. She had properly prepared the ground and sowed the seed of justice and right thinking that I—I harvested to-night. I had the honor of offering marriage to Mr. Hayes just about fifteen minutes ago. I consider that mode of procedure proved as feasible and as soon as I have received my answer, whatever it is, I shall immediately proceed with making the endowment and choosing the five young women according to the agreement."

"Polk!" I exclaimed, turning to him in a perfect panic of alarm. Could he be trifling with Jane?

"Evelina," answered Polk, giving me a shake and a shove over in the direction of the Crag, "you ought to know me better than to think I would answer such a question as Jane put to me, while driving a cranky car in waning moonlight. If you and James will just mercifully betake yourselves out there on the porch in the cold for a few minutes I will try and add my data to this equality experiment with due dignity. Go!"

We went!

"Love-woman," whispered the Crag, after I had broken it to him that we were going to be a Governor of Tennessee, and not a railroad attorney, and he had crooned his "Swing Low" over me and rocked me against his breast for a century of seconds, down on my old front gate, "you are right about the whole question. I see that, and I want to help—but if I'm stupid about life, will you hold my hand in the dark?"

"Yes," I answered with both generosity and courage.

And truly if the world is in the dusk of the dawn of a new day, what can men and women do but cling tight and feel their way—together?

THE END