ompelled to admit that there
was plainly to be observed in Miss Kate Lansdale something more than a
mere winning faith in my powers of self-control. It was difficult at
first to suspect that she actually meant to try me to the breaking
point. The suspicion brought a false note to that harmony of chastened
grief wherein, I had divined, she meant to live out her life. It seemed
too Peavey and perverse a thing that she should, finding our truce
honorably observed by myself, behave toward me as if with a cold design
to bring me down in disgrace--as a proof of her superior powers and my
own wretched weakness. Yet this very thing was I obliged regretfully to
concede of her before many days. And it was behavior that I could
palliate only by reminding myself constantly that she was not only a
woman but the daughter of Miss Caroline, and by that token subject
inevitably to certain infirmities of character. And still did she at
times evince for me that shyness which only enhanced my peril.

I managed to refrain, though in so grievous a plight, from wishing for
another war; though I did concede that if we must ever again be cursed
with war, it might as well come now as later. Regrettable though I must
consider it, I should there find, spite of my disability, some field of
active endeavor to engage my mind.

Lacking war, I sought distraction in a matter close at hand--one which
possessed quite all the vivacity of war without its violence.

Early in the summer Mrs. Aurelia Potts had resumed her activities in
behalf of our broader culture, whereupon our people murmured promptly at
Solon Denney; for him did Little Arcady still hold to account for the
infliction of this relentless evangel.

It was known that something still remained to Mrs. Potts, even after a
year, of the pittance secured from the railway company, so that it was
not necessity which drove her. To a considerable element of the town it
seemed to be mere innate perversity. "It's _in_ her," was an explanation
which Westley Keyts thought all-sufficient, though he added by way, as
it were, of putting this into raised letters for the blind, "she'd have
to raise hell just the same if it had cost that there railroad eight
million 'stead of eight hundred to exterminate Potts!"

For myself, I should have set this thing to different words. I regarded
Mrs. Potts as a zealot whom no advantage of worldly resource could blind
to our shortcomings, nor deter from ministering unto th