All the men who write me letters seem to get themselves wound up into a sky rocket and then let themselves explode in the last paragraph, and it always upsets my nerves.  I was just about to begin to cry again over the last words of the judge, when the only bright spot in the day so far suddenly happened.  Pet Buford ran in with the pinkest cheeks and the brightest eyes I had seen since I looked in the mirror the night of the dance.  She was in an awful hurry.

“Molly dear,” she said with her words literally falling over themselves, “Tom says you would give us some of your dinner left-overs to take for lunch in the car, for we are going to take a run down to Hedgeland to see some awfully fine cattle he has heard will be in the market there.  I don’t want to ask mother, in case she won’t let me go; and his mother, if he asked her, will begin to talk about us.  Tom said I was to come to you, and you would understand and arrange it all quickly.  He sent his love and all sorts of other messages.  Isn’t he fond of a joke?” And we kissed and laughed and packed a basket, and kissed and laughed again for good-bye.  I felt amused and happy for a few minutes—­and also deserted.  It’s a very good thing for a woman’s conceit to find out how many of her lovers are just make-believes.  I may have needed Tom’s deflection.

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 tea-cloth with long steady stabs, “husbands are just like sticks of 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 Alfred 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.  Alfred’s father was Mr. Johnson’s first cousin and had more crotchets and worse.  He had silent spells that lasted a week, and altogether gave his family a bad time of it.  Alfred 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.