good and quick.  And these pioneers lost any of theirs that wasn’t cemented good and hard with proved respectability.  I remember hearing Jeff Tuttle tell what he’d do to any of his womenfolks that so far forgot the sacred names of home and mother.  It was startling enough, but Jeff somehow never done it.  And if he was to hear Addie or one of the girls talking about a side-saddle to-day he’d think she was nutty or mebbe wanting one for the state museum.  So it goes with us.  My hunch is that so it will ever go.

“The years passed, and that thrill of viciousness at wearing divided skirts in public got all rubbed off—­that thrill that every last one of us adores to feel if only it don’t get her talked about—­too much—­by evil-minded gossips.  Then comes this here next upheaval over riding pants for ladies—­or them that set themselves up to be such.  Of course we’d long known that the things were worn in New York and even in such modern Babylons as Spokane and Seattle; but no woman in Red Gap had ever forgot she had a position to keep up, until summer before last, when we saw just how low one of our sex could fall, right out on the public street.

“She was the wife of a botanist from some Eastern college and him and her rode a good bit and dressed just alike in khaki things.  My, the infamies that was intimated about that poor creature!  She was bony and had plainly seen forty, very severe-featured, with scraggly hair and a sharp nose and spectacles, and looked as if she had never had a moment of the most innocent pleasure in all her life; but them riding pants fixed her good in the minds of our lady porch-knockers.  And the men just as bad, though they could hardly bear to look twice at her, she was that discouraging to the eye; they agreed with their wives that she must be one of that sort.

“But things seem to pile up all at once in our town.  That very summer the fashion magazines was handed round with pages turned down at the more daring spots where ladies were shown in such things.  It wasn’t felt that they were anything for the little ones to see.  But still, after all, wasn’t it sensible, now really, when you come right down to it? and as a matter of fact isn’t a modest woman modest in anything?—­it isn’t what she wears but how she conducts herself in public, or don’t you think so, Mrs. Ballard?—­and you might as well be dead as out of style, and would Lehman, the Square Tailor, be able to make up anything like that one there?—­but no, because how would he get your measure?—­and surely no modest woman could give him hers even if she did take it herself—­anyway, you’d be insulted by all the street rowdies as you rode by, to say nothing of being ogled by men without a particle of fineness in their natures—­but there’s always something to be said on both sides, and it’s time woman came into her own, anyway, if she is ever to be anything but man’s toy for his idle moments—­still it would never do to go to extremes in a narrow little