to have in your own home.  In fact, I listened to it anyway.  Maybe he took it from some book he read—­about woman and her true nature.  According to Henrietta Templeton Price, as near as I could get her, this Shaw or Shavian believes that women is merely a flock of men-hawks circling above the herd till they see a nice fat little lamb of a man, then one fell swoop and all is over but the screams of the victim dying out horribly.  They bear him off to their nest in a blasted pine and pick the meat from his bones at leisure.  Of course that ain’t the way ladies was spoken of in the Aunt Patty Little Helper Series I got out of the Presbyterian Sabbath-school library back in Fredonia, New York, when I was thirteen—­and yet—­and yet—­as they say on the stage in these plays of high or English life.”

It sounded promising enough, and the dust had now settled so that I could dimly make out the noble lines of my hostess.  I begged for more.

“Well, go on—­Mrs. Burchell Daggett once nearly forgot her womanhood.  Certainly, go on, if it’s anything that would be told outside of a smoking-car.”

The lady grinned.

“Many of us has forgot our womanhood in the dear, dead past,” she confessed.  “Me?  Sure!  Where’s that photo album.  Where did I put that album anyway?  That’s the way in this house.  Get things straightened up once, you can’t find a single one you want.  Look where I put it now!” She demolished an obelisk of books on the table, one she had lately constructed with some pains, and brought the album that had been its pedestal.  “Get me there, do you?”

It was the photograph of a handsome young woman in the voluminous riding skirt of years gone by, before the side-saddle became extinct.  She held a crop and wore an astoundingly plumed bonnet.  Despite the offensive disguise, one saw provocation for the course adopted by the late Lysander John Pettengill at about that period.

“Very well—­now get me here, after I’d been on the ranch only a month.”  It was the same young woman in the not too foppish garb of a cowboy.  In wide-brimmed hat, flannel shirt, woolly chaps, quirt in hand, she bestrode a horse that looked capable and daring.

“Yes, sir, I hadn’t been here only a month when I forgot my womanhood like that.  Gee!  How good it felt to get into ’em and banish that sideshow tent of a skirt.  I’d never known a free moment before and I blessed Lysander John for putting me up to it.  Then, proud as Punch, what do I do but send one of these photos back to dear old Aunt Waitstill, in Fredonia, thinking she would rejoice at the wild, free life I was now leading in the Far West.  And what do I get for it but a tear-spotted letter of eighteen pages, with a side-kick from her pastor, the Reverend Abner Hemingway, saying he wishes to indorse every word of Sister Baxter’s appeal to me—­asking why do I parade myself shamelessly in this garb of a fallen woman, and can nothing be said to recall me to the true nobility that must still be in my nature but which I am forgetting in these licentious habiliments, and so on!  The picture had been burned after giving the Reverend his own horrified flash of it, and they would both pray daily that I might get up out of this degradation and be once more a good, true woman that some pure little child would not be ashamed to call the sacred name of mother.