There is no need to conceal that I was by this time put to it for matters to think upon not clearly related to myself; in other words for matters extraneous to my neighbor’s troublesome daughter.  In sheer self-defence was I driven to look abroad for interests that would suffice without disquieting me.  I was now compelled to admit that there was plainly to be observed in Miss Kate Lansdale something more than a mere winning faith in my powers of self-control.  It was difficult at first to suspect that she actually meant to try me to the breaking point.  The suspicion brought a false note to that harmony of chastened grief wherein, I had divined, she meant to live out her life.  It seemed too Peavey and perverse a thing that she should, finding our truce honorably observed by myself, behave toward me as if with a cold design to bring me down in disgrace—­as a proof of her superior powers and my own wretched weakness.  Yet this very thing was I obliged regretfully to concede of her before many days.  And it was behavior that I could palliate only by reminding myself constantly that she was not only a woman but the daughter of Miss Caroline, and by that token subject inevitably to certain infirmities of character.  And still did she at times evince for me that shyness which only enhanced my peril.

I managed to refrain, though in so grievous a plight, from wishing for another war; though I did concede that if we must ever again be cursed with war, it might as well come now as later.  Regrettable though I must consider it, I should there find, spite of my disability, some field of active endeavor to engage my mind.

Lacking war, I sought distraction in a matter close at hand—­one which possessed quite all the vivacity of war without its violence.

Early in the summer Mrs. Aurelia Potts had resumed her activities in behalf of our broader culture, whereupon our people murmured promptly at Solon Denney; for him did Little Arcady still hold to account for the infliction of this relentless evangel.

It was known that something still remained to Mrs. Potts, even after a year, of the pittance secured from the railway company, so that it was not necessity which drove her.  To a considerable element of the town it seemed to be mere innate perversity.  “It’s in her,” was an explanation which Westley Keyts thought all-sufficient, though he added by way, as it were, of putting this into raised letters for the blind, “she’d have to raise hell just the same if it had cost that there railroad eight million ’stead of eight hundred to exterminate Potts!”

For myself, I should have set this thing to different words.  I regarded Mrs. Potts as a zealot whom no advantage of worldly resource could blind to our shortcomings, nor deter from ministering unto them.  Had it been unnecessary to earn bread for herself and little Roscoe, I am persuaded that she would still have been unremitting in her efforts to uplift us.  In that event she might, it is true, have read us more papers and sold us fewer books; but she would have allowed herself as little leisure.