hem more refined, not in the most tip-top families. Pretty!
My Lord! pretty isn't the word for it. And I think she grows prettier.
And work! Why, Mrs. Masterman, if that girl was at the head of a plant
like ours there wouldn't be anything for father and me to do but sit in
a chair and rock."

"I'm glad she's willing to see you," Lois ventured.

He sprang to his seat behind Maud. "Well, I guess she needs all the
friends she's got."

Lois ventured still further. "I'm sure she needs friends like you, Jim."

There was a flare in his eye as he fumbled for the reins. "Well, she's
only got to stoop and pick me up. Git along, Maud. Gee!" In obedience to
his pull Maud arched her heavy neck and executed a sidewise movement
uncertainly. "She knows I'm there," he continued, as the wagon creaked
round. "Been there ever since she dropped me. Gee! Maud, gee! What you
thinking of? I've never gone with any one else, Mrs. Masterman--not
really _gone_ with them. Rosie's been the only one so far. Well,
good-by. And you _will_ hold on to her, Mrs. Masterman, now, won't you?"

"Indeed I will, Jim--and--and you must do the same."

He threw her a rueful look over his shoulder, as Maud paced toward the
gate. "Oh, I'm on the job every time."

The visit gave her a number of themes for thought, of which the most
insistent was the power some women had of drawing out the love of men.
For the rest of the day her gardening became no more than a mechanical
directing of the setting out of seedlings, while she meditated on the
problem of attractiveness.

How was it that women of small endowments could captivate men at sight,
and that others of inexhaustible potentialities--she was not afraid to
rank herself among them--went unrecognized and undesired? If Rosie Fay
had been content with the honors of a local belle, she could have had
her choice among half the young men in the village. What was her gift?
What was the gift of that great sisterhood, comprising perhaps a third
of the women in the world, to whom the majority of men turned
instinctively, ignoring, or partially ignoring, the rest? Was it mere
sheep-stupidity in men themselves that sent one where the others went,
without capacity for individual discernment?--or was there a secret call
that women like Rosie Fay could give which brought them too much of that
for which other women were left famishing?

She put the question that evening to Dr. Sim Masterman, who had dropped
in to see her, a