“Alonzo gulped several times in rapid succession when he saw her, but the little man never starts anything he don’t aim to finish, and it was too late to start it then.  Henrietta brazened her way through Main Street and out to the country club and back, and next day she put them on again so Otto Hirsch, of the E-light Studio, could come up and take her standing by the horse out in front of the Price mansion.  Then they was laid away until the Grand Annual Masquerade Ball of the Order of the Eastern Star, which is a kind of hen Masons, when she again gave us a flash of what New York society ladies was riding their horse in.  As a matter of fact, Henrietta hates a horse like a rattlesnake, but she had done her pioneer work for once and all.

“Every one was now laughing and sneering at the old-fashioned divided skirt with which woman had endangered her life on a horse, and wondering how they had endured the clumsy things so long; and come spring all the prominent young society buds and younger matrons of the most exclusive set who could stay on a horse at all was getting theirs ready for the approaching season, Red Gap being like London in having its gayest season in the summer, when people can get out more.  Even Mis’ Judge Ballard fell for it, though hers was made of severe black with a long coat.  She looked exactly like that Methodist minister, the old one, that we had three years ago.

“Most of the younger set used the mail-order catalogue, their figures still permitting it.  And maybe there wasn’t a lot of trying on behind drawn blinds pretty soon, and delighted giggles and innocent girlish wonderings about whether the lowest type of man really ogles as much under certain circumstances as he’s said to.  And the minute the roads got good the telephone of Pierce’s Livery, Feed, and Sale Stable was kept on the ring.  Then the social upheaval was on.  Of course any of ’em looked quiet after Henrietta’s costume, for none of the girls but Beryl Mae Macomber, a prominent young society bud, aged seventeen, had done anything like that.  But it was the idea of the thing.

“A certain element on the South Side made a lot of talk and stirred things up and wrote letters to the president of the Civic Purity League, who was Mis’ Judge Ballard herself, asking where this unspeakable disrobing business was going to end and calling her attention to the fate that befell Sodom and Gomorrah.  But Mis’ Ballard she’s mixed on names and gets the idea these parties mean Samson and Delilah instead of a couple of twin cities, like St. Paul and Minneapolis, and she writes back saying what have these Bible characters got to do with a lady riding on horseback—­in trousers, it is true, but with a coat falling modestly to the knee on each side, and certain people had better be a little more fussy about things that really matter in life before they begin to talk.  She knew who she was hitting at all right, too.  Trust Mis’ Ballard!