re you workin' for? You know
there's a woman somewhere waitin' for you."

"And if there is, why should I want to marry the Bunker girl?"

"Now listen at him! Why, I didn't know but you'd got tired of foolin'
with the other one. Who is she? That tall critter that was out here?
Well, I don't know about her, with her art. Art the cat's foot! You'd
better marry a woman that knows how to do housework. She may be all
right for summer, but you'd better marry a woman for winter. Don't you
think so, Bob?"

"For winter and summer, I should think," said the hired man. "But I
married one for winter, and she went away along in July. But I guess I
could get her again."

"And he's just about fool enough to take her," Milford spoke up. "Why,
she'd run away again."

"I don't think that, Bill. I guess she's got more sense now."

"At any rate, she's got more sense than you," said the old woman. "She
had sense enough to run away and you didn't. But I hear that somebody
else run away, Bill. I heard that you left a wife out West."

"You heard a lie, madam," Milford replied. "But that's not hard to hear.
A man may be ever so deaf, and sometimes might hear a lie."

"That's gospel, Mrs. Stuvic," said the hired man. "I was out at the deaf
and dumb asylum one time, and they had a boy shut up for lyin' with his
fingers."

"Well, what do you come tellin' me about it for? Do you s'pose I care? I
wasn't talkin' about lyin'. I was talkin' about some folks not havin'
much sense, and you was right at the top of the pot, I'll tell you that.
You haven't got sense enough to catch a good woman."

"I might not have from your standpoint, but I have from mine. I don't
believe I'd want the woman you'd call good. She'd think it was her duty
to keep a man stirred up all the time; she'd make him work himself to
death."

"Well," she snapped, "a woman's better off every time she makes a man
work himself to death, I'll tell you that."

"Yes, from your standpoint," drawled the hired man, opening the stove
door to get a light for his pipe. "But I wouldn't kill myself for no
woman, would you, Bill?"

"I don't know that I'm called on to do it," Milford replied. "Give me
that," he added, reaching for the bit of blazing paper which the hired
man was about to put out. He lighted his pipe, threw the burning paper
on the stove, and idly looked at the cinder waving in the draft. "As
unsteadfast as Mitchell's love," he said.

"What is?" the hired man inquired.