olled at her feet.

This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words
Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding,
exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was
afraid of stepping on her train. Was it strange she should think
that? She was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons
according to her kind and from what she knew of life. So she imagined
Crozier's wife to have been a sort of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who
swept up the dust of the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at
all to the children of nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower
than their ankles. She almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a
man like Crozier, who had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in
the witness-box as he did; who took the bullet of the assassin with such
courage; who broke a horse like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech
on a filly's flank, should crumple up at the thought of a woman who,
anyhow, couldn't be taller than Crozier himself was, and hadn't a hand
like a piece of steel and the skin of an antelope. It was enough to make
a cat laugh, or a woman cry with rage.

"Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly
handsome!" There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing
woman, in velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and
overbearing, like grey poplin. Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the
mirror-the half-length mirror on the opposite wall--and she felt her
hands clench and her bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive
calico frock, a thing for Chloe, not for Juno.

She was very angry with Crozier, for it was absurd, that look of
deprecating homage, that "Hush-she-is-coming" in his eyes. What a fool a
man was where a woman was concerned! Here she had been fighting herself
for a fortnight to conquer a useless passion for her man of all the
world, fit to command an array of giants; and she saw him now almost
breathless as he spoke of a great wild-cat of a woman who ought to be by
his side now. What sort of a woman was she anyhow, who could let him go
into exile as he had done and live apart from her all these years,
while he "slogged away"--that was the Western phrase which came to
her mind--to pull himself level with things again? Her feet shuffled
unevenly on the floor, and it would have been a joy to shake the in
valid there with the rapt look in his face. Unable to b