her red tormentor, she halted at Milford's cottage. He was sitting on
the veranda, with the billows of a Sunday newspaper about him on the
floor. She introduced her husband, who nodded. She spoke of the fervor
of the day and the ragged cloud-skirts flaunting in the sky. She thought
it must be going to rain. In the city a rain was wasted, a sloppy
distress; but in the country it was a beautiful and refreshing
necessity. In each great drop there was a stanza of sentiment.

Milford's eyes twinkled. "You ought to go to a mining-camp," he said.
"Men who couldn't parse would call you a poem."

She turned to her husband. "George, do you hear that? Isn't that sweet?
So unaffected, too." George grunted; he was thinking of the receiver
that had had charge of his affairs. His wife continued, speaking to
Milford: "In my almost hothouse refinement, I have longed to see the
rude chivalry of the West--where a rhythm of true gallantry beats
beneath a woolen shirt."

"Yes," said Milford, "and beneath a linen shirt, too. The West is just
as wide but not so woolen as it was."

"Oh, what quaint conceits! George, do you hear them? George, dear."

"George, dear" turned a tired eye upon her. Affection seeking to console
a loved one sometimes chooses an unseasonable moment for the exercise of
its tender office. She felt the look of her husband's worry-rusted eye;
a memory of his weary pacing up and down the floor at night came to her,
of his groans upon a comfortless bed, his sighs at breakfast, his dark
brow as he went forth to try again to save his credit. She thought of
this; she felt that at this moment he needed her help. And
affectionately she put her hand upon his arm, and said: "You have met
reverses, George, but you've still got me." And George muttered: "You
bet I have." She glanced at him as if she felt that he said it with a
lack of enthusiasm, as if it were a sad fact acknowledged rather than a
possession declared; and she would have replied with a thin sentiment
strained through the muslin of a summer book, but George turned away.
She followed and he opened a gate and halted, waiting for her to pass
through. The boy crawled under the fence. She scolded the youngster,
brushed at his clothes, and said to George:

"He is almost a gentleman."

"Who is so far gone as that?"

"Why, the man back there on the veranda."

"I don't know what you mean by almost a gentleman."

"Oh, George, don't you know that there are distinctions