. Old man Tree, his wife, and his daughter Hilma looked
after the dairy. But there was not always work enough to keep the three
of them occupied and Hilma at times made herself useful in other ways.
As often as not she lent a hand in the kitchen, and two or three times
a week she took her mother's place in looking after Annixter's house,
making the beds, putting his room to rights, bringing his meals up
from the kitchen. For the last summer she had been away visiting with
relatives in one of the towns on the coast. But the week previous to
this she had returned and Annixter had come upon her suddenly one day
in the dairy, making cheese, the sleeves of her crisp blue shirt waist
rolled back to her very shoulders. Annixter had carried away with him a
clear-cut recollection of these smooth white arms of hers, bare to the
shoulder, very round and cool and fresh. He would not have believed that
a girl so young should have had arms so big and perfect. To his surprise
he found himself thinking of her after he had gone to bed that night,
and in the morning when he woke he was bothered to know whether he had
dreamed about Hilma's fine white arms over night. Then abruptly he
had lost patience with himself for being so occupied with the subject,
raging and furious with all the breed of feemales--a fine way for a
man to waste his time. He had had his experience with the timid little
creature in the glove-cleaning establishment in Sacramento. That was
enough. Feemales! Rot! None of them in HIS, thank you. HE had seen Hilma
Tree give him a look in the dairy. Aha, he saw through her! She was
trying to get a hold on him, was she? He would show her. Wait till
he saw her again. He would send her about her business in a hurry. He
resolved upon a terrible demeanour in the presence of the dairy girl--a
great show of indifference, a fierce masculine nonchalance; and when,
the next morning, she brought him his breakfast, he had been smitten
dumb as soon as she entered the room, glueing his eyes upon his
plate, his elbows close to his side, awkward, clumsy, overwhelmed with
constraint.

While true to his convictions as a woman-hater and genuinely despising
Hilma both as a girl and as an inferior, the idea of her worried him.
Most of all, he was angry with himself because of his inane sheepishness
when she was about. He at first had told himself that he was a fool not
to be able to ignore her existence as hitherto, and then that he was a
greate