he widow, ignoring the last flippant bit of
persiflage and picking up the violet envelope, "posting a letter for
me?"

"May I look at the address?" demanded the bachelor.

"It's to the boy," began the widow, "who--who----"

"Took the roundabout way?" finished the bachelor, helpfully.

The widow nodded.

"I have written him," she explained, "that he mustn't--that it would be
best if he wouldn't come here any more. That will keep him in his place,
I think."

"On his knees?" inquired the bachelor sarcastically.

"And I told him," proceeded the widow, with a reproachful glance at the
bachelor, "how very rude and foolish----"

"Did you explain," interrupted the bachelor, "that the foolishness
consisted in not taking the kiss?"

"Mr. Travers!"

"And that the rudeness lay entirely in assuming that you might not want
to be----"

"How dare you!" cried the widow, flaming as red as the scarlet satin
sofa pillow behind her head. "I gave him a dreadful scolding!" she
added, looking pensively at the sealed note and toying with the edge of
the flap, as though she half wished it would come open again.

"In other words," remarked the bachelor laconically, "having him down,
you proceeded to wipe your feet on him. Since he had turned the left
cheek, you made him turn all the way round, so that you could stick pins
in his back and make him feel like the thirty-second vertebrae and----"

"I had to, Mr. Travers," cried the widow pleadingly. "It was my duty."

"Your--what?"

"To teach him a lesson," explained the widow promptly. "He's got to
learn that in the situation between man and woman there's only one
throne and that whoever gets up on it first wields the sceptre. He's got
to learn that the conquest of woman is not, like the Battle of Waterloo,
an affair of strategy, but like the Battle of Bunker Hill or
Sennacherib----"

"Or the Boston Tea Party or the Massacre of the Innocents," broke in the
bachelor. "But aren't you a little hard on the girl? If you get him too
well trained he'll beat her."

"Well," replied the widow promptly, "if he does she'll adore him.
Besides, it's much better to have the matrimonial medicine administered
in allopathic doses than in the little homeopathic pellets of caution
and deceit, and lies and arguments which end in the divorce court, and a
woman enjoys being bossed and bullied and ordered about by the man she
loves quite as much as he enjoys the bossing and bullying. It's her
natural