I said if they would wait till haying was over I could and would.  He answered they would wait till my hay was garnered—­that’s the pretty word he used—­and could he also bring his mouthless chit with him?  I didn’t quite make him.  He writes a hand that would never get by in a business college.  I thought it might be something tame he carried in a cage, and would stay quiet all day while he was out pursuing his repulsive practices.  It didn’t sound troublesome.

I never made a worse guess.  It was his daughter he talked about that way.  She was all right enough, though astounding when you had expected something highly zoological and mouthless instead of motherless.  She was a tall roan girl with the fashionable streamline body, devoted to the ukulele and ladies’ wearing apparel.  But not so young as that sounds.  Her general manner of conduct was infantile enough, but she had tired eyes and a million little lines coming round ’em, and if you got her in a strong light you saw she was old enough to have a serious aim in life.

She did use massage cream and beauty lotions with a deep seriousness you wouldn’t suspect her of when she sat out in the hammock in the moonlight and scratched this ukulele and acted the part of a mere porch wren.  That was really the girl’s trade; all she’d ever learned.  Mebbe she had misspent her early youth, or mebbe she wasn’t meant for anything else—­just a butterfly with some of the gold powder brushed off and the wings a little mite crumpled.

Gee!  How times have changed since I took my own hair out of a braid!  In them fond old days when a girl didn’t seem attractive enough for marriage she took up a career—­school-teaching probably—­and was looked at sidewise by her family.  It’s different now.  In this advanced day a girl seems to start for the career first and take up marriage only when all other avenues is closed.  She’s the one that is now regarded by her brainy sisters as a failure.  I consider it an evil state for the world to be in—­but no matter; I can’t do anything about it from up here, with haytime coming on.

Anyway, this Lydia girl had not been constructed for any career requiring the serious use of the head; and yet so far she had failed in the other one.  She was on the way to being an outcast if she didn’t pull something desperate pretty soon.  She was looking down on thirty, and I bet her manner hadn’t changed a bit since she was looking up to twenty.

Of course she’d learned things about her game.  Living round a college she must of tried her wiles on at least ten graduating classes of young men.  Naturally she’d learned technique and feminine knavery.  She was still flirty enough.  She had a little short upper lip that she could lift with great pathos.  And the party hadn’t more than landed here when I saw that at last she did have a serious aim in life.