tics pay. That is a difficult thing to do in a country town,
where every voter is a watchdog of the county and city treasuries. Abner
gave up his gambling, he and his wife joined all the lodges in town, and
she dragged him into that coterie of people known as Society. She joined
a woman's club, and was always anxious to be appointed on the soliciting
committee when the women had any public work to do; so when the library
needed books, or the trash cans at the street corners needed paint, or
the park trees needed trimming, or the new hospital needed an additional
bed, or the band needed new uniforms, Mrs. Handy might be seen on the
streets with two or three women of a much better social status than she
had, making it clear that she was a public-spirited woman and that she
moved in the best circles. Whereupon Abner Handy got work in the
court-house--as a deputy, or as a clerk, or as an under-sheriff, or as a
juror--and when the legislature met he went to Topeka as a clerk.

No one knew how they lived, but they did live. Every two years they gave
a series of parties, and the splendour of these festivals made the town
exclaim in one voice: "Well, _how_ do they do it?" But Mrs. Handy, who
was steaming the wrinkles out of her face, and assuming more or less
kittenish airs in her late thirties, never offered the town an
explanation. "Hers not to answer why, hers not to make reply, hers but
to do and dye" was the way Colonel Morrison put it the day after Mrs.
Handy swooped down into Main Street with a golden yellow finish on her
hair. She walked serenely between Mrs. Frelinghuysen and Mrs. Priscilla
Winthrop Conklin. They were begging for funds with which to furnish a
rest room for farmers' wives. And when they bore down on our office,
Colonel Morrison folded his papers in his bosom and passed them on the
threshold as one hurrying to a fire in the roof of his own house. It was
interesting to observe, when the Federation Committee called on us that
day, that Mrs. Handy did all the talking. She was as full of airs and
graces as an actress, and ogled with her glassy eyes, and put on a sweet
babyish innocence of the ways of business and of men--as though men were
a race apart, greatly to be feared because they ate up little girls. But
she got her dollar before she left the office, and George Kirwin, who
happened to be in the front room at the time waiting for a proof, said
he thought that the performance and the new hair were worth t