er face broke into dimples, and all her white teeth shone. The
hotel-keeper may have had a daughter, and the farmer in the outskirts
had two, but we never saw them. She reigned alone. All the men
worshipped her. She was the only woman they had to think of. They talked
of her on the stoep, at the market, at the hotel; they watched for her
at street corners; they hated the man she bowed to or walked with down
the street. They brought flowers to the front door; they offered her
their horses; they begged her to marry them when they dared. Partly,
there was something noble and heroic in this devotion of men to the best
woman they knew; partly there was something natural in it, that these
men, shut off from the world, should pour at the feet of one woman the
worship that otherwise would have been given to twenty; and partly there
was something mean in their envy of one another. If she had raised her
little finger, I suppose, she might have married any one out of twenty
of them.

Then I came. I do not think I was prettier; I do not think I was so
pretty as she was. I was certainly not as handsome. But I was vital, and
I was new, and she was old--they all forsook her and followed me. They
worshipped me. It was to my door that the flowers came; it was I had
twenty horses offered me when I could only ride one; it was for me they
waited at street corners; it was what I said and did that they talked
of. Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life; no one ever had
told me I was beautiful and a woman. I believed them. I did not know
it was simply a fashion, which one man had set and the rest followed
unreasoningly. I liked them to ask me to marry them, and to say, No.
I despised them. The mother heart had not swelled in me yet; I did not
know all men were my children, as the large woman knows when her heart
is grown. I was too small to be tender. I liked my power. I was like
a child with a new whip, which it goes about cracking everywhere, not
caring against what. I could not wind it up and put it away. Men were
curious creatures, who liked me, I could never tell why. Only one thing
took from my pleasure; I could not bear that they had deserted her for
me. I liked her great dreamy blue eyes, I liked her slow walk and drawl;
when I saw her sitting among men, she seemed to me much too good to be
among them; I would have given all their compliments if she would once
have smiled at me as she smiled at them, with all her face breaking