That hotel does a big business, but it fell off surprising the day after this, twenty-three people having been took bad with poison from something they’d et there at lunch.  True, none of these got as fur as the coroner, so it never was known exactly what they’d took in; but the thing made a lot of talk at stricken bedsides and Genevieve spent a dull day denying that her cooking had done this outrage.  Then, her dignity being much hurt, she wrote a letter to the papers saying this hotel man was giving his guests cheap canned goods that had done the trick.

Next morning this brought the hotel man and one of the best lawyers in the state of Washington up to the palatial Popper residence, making threats after they got in that no lady taking up war activities should be obliged to listen to.  She got rattled, I guess, or had been dreaming or something.  She told the hotel man and lawyer to Ssh!  Ssh!—­because that new cook had put ground glass in the lemon pie and she had a right to lull his suspicions with this letter to the papers, because she was connected with the Secret Service Department.  She would now go back to the hotel and detect this spy committing sabotage on the mashed potatoes, or something, and arrest him—­just like that!  I don’t know whatever put the idea into her head.  I believe she had tried to join the Secret Service Department till she found they didn’t have uniforms.

Anyway, this hotel man, like the cowardly dog he was, went straight off to some low sneak in the district attorney’s office; and he went like a snake in the grass and found out it wasn’t so; and a real officer come down on Genevieve May to know what she meant by impersonating a Secret Service agent.  This brutal thug talked in a cold but rough way, and I know perfectly well this minute that he wasn’t among those invited to the Popper costume ball of the Allied nations.  He threw a fine scare into Genevieve May.  For about a week she didn’t know but she’d be railroaded to Walla Walla.  She wore mere civilian creations and acted like a slacker.

But finally she saw the Government was going to live and let live; so she took up something new.  It was still On to Berlin! with Genevieve May.

She wasn’t quite up to pulling anything new in her home town; so she went into the outlying districts to teach her grandmother something.  I didn’t think up the term for it.  That was thought up by G.H.  Stultz who is her son-in-law and president of the Red Gap Canning Factory.  This here new war activity she’d took up consisted of going rough to different places and teaching housewives how to practice economy in putting up preserves, and so on.

It ain’t on record that she ever taught one single woman anything about economy, their hard-won knowledge beginning about where hers left off—­which wasn’t fur from where it started; but she did bring a lot of wholesome pleasure into their simple, hard-working lives.