“Some said he not only wasn’t a hobo but wasn’t even a poet,” she presently murmured, and smoked again.  Then:  “That Ben Sutton, now, he’s a case.  Comes from Alaska and don’t like fresh eggs for breakfast because he says they ain’t got any kick to ’em like Alaska eggs have along in March, and he’s got to have canned milk for his coffee.  Say, I got a three-quarters Jersey down in Red Gap gives milk so rich that the cream just naturally trembles into butter if you speak sharply to it or even give it a cross look; not for Ben though.  Had to send out for canned milk that morning.  I drew the line at hunting up case eggs for him though.  He had to put up with insipid fresh ones.  And fat, that man!  My lands!  He travels a lot in the West when he does leave home, and he tells me it’s the fear of his life he’ll get wedged into one of them narrow-gauge Pullmans some time and have to be chopped out.  Well, as I was saying—­” She paused.

“But you haven’t begun,” I protested.  I sharply tapped the printed verses and the photograph reading from left to right.  Now she became animated, speaking as she expertly rolled a fresh cigarette.

“Say, did you ever think what aggravating minxes women are after they been married a few years—­after the wedding ring gets worn a little bit thin?”

This was not only brutal; it seemed irrelevant.

“Wilfred Lennox—­” I tried to insist, but she commandingly raised the new cigarette at me.

“Yes, sir!  Ever know one of ’em married for as long as ten years that didn’t in her secret heart have a sort of contempt for her life partner as being a stuffy, plodding truck horse?  Of course they keep a certain dull respect for him as a provider, but they can’t see him as dashing and romantic any more; he ain’t daring and adventurous.  All he ever does is go down and open up the store or push back the roll-top, and keep from getting run over on the street.  One day’s like another with him, never having any wild, lawless instincts or reckless moods that make a man fascinating—­about the nearest he ever comes to adventure is when he opens the bills the first of the month.  And she often seeing him without any collar on, and needing a shave mebbe, and cherishing her own secret romantic dreams, while like as not he’s prosily figuring out how he’s going to make the next payment on the endowment policy.

“It’s a hard, tiresome life women lead, chained to these here plodders.  That’s why rich widows generally pick out the dashing young devils they do for their second, having buried the man that made it for ’em.  Oh, they like him well enough, call him ‘Father’ real tenderly, and see that he changes to the heavy flannels on time, but he don’t ever thrill them, and when they order three hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of duds from the Boston Cash Emporium and dress up like a foreign countess, they don’t do it for Father, they do it for the romantic guy in the magazine serial they’re reading, the handsome, cynical adventurer that has such an awful power over women.  They know darned well they won’t ever meet him; still it’s just as well to be ready in case he ever should make Red Gap—­or wherever they live—­and it’s easy with the charge account there, and Father never fussing more than a little about the bills.