y as thirty-four tucked away in her top bureau drawer!'--'I
wouldn't wonder,' says Martha, stooping lower and lower over
Thomkins's blue cotton shirt that she's trying to cut down into
rompers for the baby. 'And, Martha,' I says, 'that letter is just a
joke. One of the boys sure put it up on him!'--'Why, of course,' says
Martha, with her mouth all puckered up crooked, as though a kid had
stitched it on the machine. 'Why, of course! How dared you think--'"

Forking one bushy eyebrow, the Salesman turned and stared quizzically
off into space.

"But all the samey, just between you and I," he continued judicially,
"all the samey, I'll wager you anything you name that it ain't just
death that's pulling Martha down day by day, and night by night,
limper and lanker and clumsier-footed. Martha's got a sore thought.
That's what ails her. And God help the crittur with a sore thought!
God help anybody who's got any one single, solitary sick idea that
keeps thinking on top of itself, over and over and over, boring into
the past, bumping into the future, fussing, fretting, eternally
festering. Gee! Compared to it, a tight shoe is easy slippers, and
water dropping on your head is perfect peace!--Look close at Martha,
I say. Every night when the blowsy old moon shines like courting
time, every day when the butcher's bill comes home as big as a swollen
elephant, when the crippled stepson tries to cut his throat again,
when the youngest kid sneezes funny like his father--'WHO WAS
ROSIE? WHO WAS ROSIE?'"

"Well, who was Rosie?" persisted the Youngish Girl absent-mindedly.

"Why, Rosie was _nothing_!" snapped the Traveling Salesman; "nothing
at all--probably." Altogether in spite of himself, his voice trailed
off into a suspiciously minor key. "But all the same," he continued
more vehemently, "all the same--it's just that little darned word
'probably' that's making all the mess and bother of it--because, as
far as I can reckon, a woman can stand absolutely anything under God's
heaven that she knows; but she just up and can't stand the littlest,
teeniest, no-account sort of thing that she ain't sure of. Answers may
kill 'em dead enough, but it's questions that eats 'em alive."

For a long, speculative moment the Salesman's gold-rimmed eyes went
frowning off across the snow-covered landscape. Then he ripped off his
glasses and fogged them very gently with his breath.

"Now--I--ain't--any--saint," mused the Traveling Salesman
meditati