“I got to tell you about Henrietta.  She’s one of them like I just said the harsh things about, with the secret cry in her heart for romance and adventure and other forbidden things and with a kindly contempt for peaceful Alonzo.  She admits to being thirty-six, so you can figure it out for yourself.  Of course she gets her husband wrong at that, as women so often do.  Alonzo has probably the last pair of side whiskers outside of a steel engraving and stands five feet two, weighing a hundred and twenty-six pounds at the ring side, but he’s game as a swordfish, and as for being romantic in the true sense of the word—­well, no one that ever heard him sell a lot in Price’s Addition—­three miles and a half up on the mesa, with only the smoke of the canning factory to tell a body they was still near the busy haunts of men, that and a mile of concrete sidewalk leading a life of complete idleness—­I say no one that ever listened to Lon sell a lot up there, pointing out on a blue print the proposed site of the Carnegie Library, would accuse him of not being romantic.

“But of course Henrietta never sees Lon’s romance and he ain’t always had the greatest patience with hers—­like the time she got up the Art Loan Exhibit to get new books for the M.E.  Sabbath-school library and got Spud Mulkins of the El Adobe to lend ’em the big gold-framed oil painting that hangs over his bar.  Some of the other ladies objected to this—­the picture was a big pink hussy lying down beside the ocean—­but Henrietta says art for art’s sake is pure to them that are pure, or something, and they’re doing such things constantly in the East; and I’m darned if Spud didn’t have his oil painting down and the mosquito netting ripped off it before Alonzo heard about it and put the Not-at-All on it.  He wouldn’t reason with Henrietta either.  He just said his objection was that every man that saw it would put one foot up groping for the brass railing, which would be undignified for a Sabbath-school scheme, and that she’d better hunt out something with clothes on like Whistler’s portrait of his mother, or, if she wanted the nude in art, to get the Horse Fair or something with animals.

“I tell you that to show you how they don’t hit it off sometimes.  Then Henrietta sulks.  Kind of pinched and hungry looking she is, drapes her black hair down over one side of her high forehead, wears daring gowns—­that’s what she calls ’em anyway—­and reads the most outrageous kinds of poetry out loud to them that will listen.  Likes this Omar Something stuff about your path being beset with pitfalls and gin fizzes and getting soused out under a tree with your girl.