Anyway, I don’t know when I ever was so glad to see anybody as I was when Mrs. Johnson came in the front door.  A woman who has proved to her own satisfaction that marriage is a failure is at times a great tonic to other women.  I needed a tonic badly this morning and I got it.

“Well, from all my long experience, Molly,” she said as she seated herself and began to hem a dish-towel with long steady stabs, “husbands are just stick candy in different jars.  They may look a little different, but they all taste alike and you soon get tired of them.  In two months you won’t know the difference in being married to Al Bennett and Mr. Carter and you’ll have to go on living with him maybe fifty years.  Luck doesn’t strike twice in the same place and you can’t count on losing two husbands.  Al’s father was Mr. Johnson’s first cousin and had more crochets and worse.  He had silent spells that lasted a week and family prayers three times a day, though he got drunk twice a year for a month at a time.  Al looks very much like him.”

“Mrs. Johnson,” I said after a minute’s silence, while I had decided whether or not I had better tell her all about it.  If a woman’s in love with her husband you can’t trust her to keep a secret, but I decided to try Mrs. Johnson.  “I really am not engaged exactly to Alfred Bennett, though I suppose he thinks so by now if he has got the answer to that telegram.  But—­but something has made me—­made me think about Judge Wade—­that is he—­what do you think of him, Mrs. Johnson?” I concluded in the most pitifully perplexed tone of voice.

“All alike, Molly; all as much alike as peas in a pod; all except John Moore, who’s the only exception in all the male tribe I ever met!  His marrying once was just accidental and must be forgiven him.  She fell in love with him while he was treating her for typhoid, when his back was turned as it were, and it was God’s own kindness in him that made him marry her when he found out how it was with the poor thing.  There’s not a woman in this town who could marry, that wouldn’t marry him at the drop of his hat—­but, thank goodness, that hat will never drop and I’ll have one sensible man to comfort and doctor me down into my old age.  Now, just look at that!  Mr. Johnson’s come home here in the middle of the morning and I’ll have to get that old paper I hunted out of his desk for him last night.  I wonder how he came to forget it!” It’s funny how Mrs. Johnson always knows what Mr. Johnson wants before he knows himself and gets it before he asks for it!

As she went out the gate the postman came in and at the sight of another letter my heart again slunk off into my slippers, and my brain seemed about to back up in a corner and refuse to work.  In a flash it came to me that men oughtn’t to write letters to women very much—­they really don’t plow deep enough, they just irritate the top soil.  I took this missive from Alfred, counted all the fifteen pages, put it out of sight under a book, looked out