“Meantime, I keep them two records het up for the benefit of my reluctant couple:  daytime for Nettie—­she standing dreamy-eyed while it was doing, showing she was coming more and more human, understand—­and evenings for both of ’em, when Chester Timmins would call.  And Chet himself about the third night begins to get a new look in his eyes, kind of absent and desperate, so I thinks this here lady professional will simply goad him to a frenzy.  Oh, we had some sad musical week before that concert!  That was when this crazy Chink of mine got took by the song.  He don’t know yet what it means, but it took him all right; he got regular besotted with it, keeping the kitchen door open all the time, so he wouldn’t miss a single turn.  It took his mind off his work, too.  Talk about the Yellow Peril!  He got so locoed with that song one day, what does he do but peel and cook up twelve dollars’ worth of the Piedmont Queen dahlia bulbs I’d ordered for the front yard.  Sure!  Served ’em with cream sauce, and we et ’em, thinking they was some kind of a Chinese vegetable.

“But I was saying about this new look in Chester’s eyes, kind of far-off and criminal, when that song was playing.  And then something give me a pause, as they say.  Chet showed up one evening with his nails all manicured; yes, sir, polished till you needed smoked glasses to look at ’em.  I knew all right where he’d been.  I may as well tell you that Henry Lehman was giving Red Gap a flash of form with his new barber shop—­tiled floor, plate-glass front, exposed plumbing, and a manicure girl from Seattle; yes, sir, just like in the great wicked cities.  It had already turned some of our very best homes into domestic hells, and no wonder!  Decent, God-fearing men, who’d led regular lives and had whiskers and grown children, setting down to a little spindle-legged table with this creature, dipping their clumsy old hands into a pink saucedish of suds and then going brazenly back to their innocent families with their nails glittering like piano keys.  Oh, that young dame was bound to be a social pet among the ladies of the town, yes—­no?  She was pretty and neat figured, with very careful hair, though its colour had been tampered with unsuccessfully, and she wore little, blue-striped shirtwaists that fitted very close—­you know—­with low collars.  It was said that she was a good conversationalist and would talk in low, eager tones to them whose fingers she tooled.

“Still, I didn’t think anything of Chester resorting to that sanitary den of vice.  All I think is that he’s trying to pretty himself up for Nettie and maybe show her he can be a man-about-town, like them she has known in Spokane and in Yonkers, New York, at the select home of Mrs. W.B.  Hemingway and her husband.  How little we think when we had ought to be thinking our darndest!  Me?  I just went on playing them two records, the male barytone and the lady mezzo, and trying to curse that Chinaman into keeping the kitchen door shut on his cooking,