After the men left one morning on their hunt for long-defunct wood ticks and such, Lydia confided to me that she was really going to open that trunk.  She was going to put her mind on it.  She hadn’t done this yet, it seemed, but to-day she would.

“The poor boy has been rudely jarred in his academic serenity,” says she.  “He can’t bear up much longer; he has rats in his wainscoting right now.  It makes me perfectly furious to see a man so helpless without a woman.  Today I’ll open his silly old trunk for him.”

“It will be the best day’s work you ever done,” I says, and she nearly blushed.

“I’m not thinking of that,” she says.

The little liar!  As if she hadn’t seen as well as I had how Oswald was regarding her with new eyes.  So I wished her good luck and started out myself, having some field work of my own to do that day in measuring a lot of haystacks down at the lower end of the ranch.

She said there would be no luck in it—­nothing but cool determination and a woman’s intuition.  I let it go at that and went off to see that I didn’t get none of the worst of it when this new hay was measured.  I had a busy day, forgetting all scientific problems and the uphill fight our sex sometimes has in bringing a man to his just mating sense.

I got back about five that night.  Here was Miss Lydia, cool and negligent on the porch, like she’d never had a care in the world; fresh dressed in something white and blue, with her niftiest hammock stockings, and tinkling the ukulele in a bored and petulant manner.

“Did you open it?” I says as I went in.

“Open it?” she says, kind of blank.  “Oh, you mean that silly old trunk!  Yes, I believe I did.  At least I think I did.”

It was good stage acting; an audience would of thought she had forgotten.  So I took it as calm as she did and went in to change.

By the time I got out the men was just coming in, the Prof being enthusiastic about some clamshells of the year six million B. C. and Oswald bearing his great sorrow with an effort to do it bravely.

Lydia nodded distantly and then ignored the men in a pointed way, breaking out into rapid chatter to me about the lack of society up here—­didn’t I weary of the solitude, never meeting people of the right sort?  It was a new line with her and done for effect, but I couldn’t see what effect.

Supper was ready and we hurried in to it; so I guess Oswald must of forgot for one time to shake his trunk and listen to the pretty little keys.  And all through the meal Lydia confined her attentions entirely to me.  She ignored Oswald mostly, but if she did notice him she patronized him.  She was painfully superior to him, and severe and short, like he was a little boy that had been let to come to the table with the grown-ups for this once.  She rattled along to me about the club dances at home, and how they was going to have better music this year, and how the assembly hall had been done over in a perfectly dandy colour scheme by the committee she was on, and a lot of girlish babble that took up much room but weighed little.