“Such was Aunt Waitstill—­what names them poor old girls had to stand for!  I had another aunt named Obedience, only she proved to be a regular cinch-binder.  Her name was never mentioned in the family after she slid down a rainspout one night and eloped to marry a depraved scoundrel who drove through there on a red wagon with tinware inside that he would trade for old rags.  I’m just telling you how times have changed in spite of the best efforts of a sanctified ministry.  I cried over that letter at first.  Then I showed it to Lysander John, who said ‘Oh, hell!’ being a man of few words, so I felt better and went right on forgetting my womanhood in that shameless garb of a so-and-so—­though where aunty had got her ideas of such I never could make out—­and it got to be so much a matter of course and I had so many things to think of besides my womanhood that I plumb forgot the whole thing until this social upheaval in Red Gap a few years ago.

“I got to tell you that the wild and lawless West, in all matters relating to proper dress for ladies, is the most conservative and hidebound section of our great land of the free and home of the brave—­if you can get by with it.  Out here the women see by the Sunday papers that it’s being wore that way publicly in New York and no one arrested for it, but they don’t hardly believe it at that, and they wouldn’t show themselves in one, not if you begged them to on your bended knees, and what is society coming to anyway?  You might as well dress like one of them barefooted dancers, only calling ’em barefooted must be meant like sarcasm—­and they’d die before they’d let a daughter of theirs make a show of herself like that for odious beasts of men to leer at, and so on—­until a couple years later Mrs. Henrietta Templeton Price gets a regular one and wears it down Main Street, and nothing objectionable happens; so then they all hustle to get one—­not quite so extreme, of course, but after all, why not, since only the evil-minded could criticise?  Pretty soon they’re all wearing it exactly like New York did two years ago, with mebbe the limit raised a bit here and there by some one who makes her own.  But again they’re saying that the latest one New York is wearing is so bad that it must be confined to a certain class of women, even if they do get taken from left to right at Asbury Park and Newport and other colonies of wealth and fashion, because the vilest dregs can go there if they have the price, which they often do.

“Red Gap is like that.  With me out here on the ranch it didn’t matter what I wore because it was mostly only men that saw me; but I can well remember the social upheaval when our smartest young matrons and well-known society belles flung modesty to the chinook wind and took to divided skirts for horseback riding.  My, the brazen hussies!  It ain’t so many years ago.  Up to that time any female over the age of nine caught riding a horse cross-saddle would have lost her character