mean is,' he says, 'there was talk when I
left this morning of the poet consenting to take a class in poetry for
several weeks in our thriving little city, and Henrietta was urging him
to make our house his home. I have a sort of feeling that Ben will be
able to make several suggestions of prime value. I have never known him
to fail at making suggestions.'

"Funny, the way the little man tried to put it over on us, letting on he
was just puzzled--not really bothered, as he plainly was. You knew
Henrietta was still seeing the big red splash of Romance, behind which
the figure of her husband was totally obscured. Jeff Tuttle saw the
facts, and he up and spoke in a very common way about what would quickly
happen to any tramp that tried to camp in his house, poet or no poet,
but that's neither here nor there. We left Alonzo looking cheerily
forward to Ben Sutton on the eleven forty-two, and I went on to do some
errands.

"In the course of these I discovered that others besides Henrietta had
fell hard for the poet of Nature. I met Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale
and she just bubbles about him, she having been at the Prices' the night
before.

"'Isn't he a glorious thing!' she says; 'and how grateful we should be
for the dazzling bit of colour he brings into our drab existence!' She
is a good deal like that herself at times. And I met Beryl Mae Macomber,
a well known young society girl of seventeen, and Beryl Mae says: 'He's
awfully good looking, but do you think he's sincere?' And even Mrs.
Judge Ballard comes along and says: 'What a stimulus he should be to us
in our dull lives! How he shows us the big, vital bits!' and her at that
very minute going into Bullitt & Fleishacker's to buy shoes for her
nine year old twin grandsons! And the Reverend Mrs. Wiley Knapp in at
the Racquet Store wanting to know if the poet didn't make me think of
some wild, free creature of the woods--a deer or an antelope poised for
instant flight while for one moment he timidly overlooked man in his
hideous commercialism. But, of course, she was a minister's wife. I said
he made me feel just like that. I said so to all of 'em. What else could
I say? If I'd said what I thought there on the street I'd of been
pinched. So I beat it home in self-protection. I was sympathizing good
and hearty with Lon Price by that time and looking forward to Ben Sutton
myself. I had a notion Ben would see the right of it where these poor
dubs of husbands wouldn't--