“It was found that there was almost the expected amount of ogling from sidewalk loafers, at first.  As Daisy Estelle Maybury said, it seemed as if a girl couldn’t show herself on the public thoroughfare without being subjected to insult.  Poor Daisy Estelle!  She had been a very popular young society belle, and was considered one of the most attractive girls in Red Gap until this happened.  No one had ever suspected it of her in the least degree up to that time.  Of course it was too late after she was once seen off her horse.  Them that didn’t see was told in full detail by them that did.  Most of the others was luckier.  Beryl Mae Macomber in her sport shirt and trouserettes complained constantly about the odious wretches along Main Street and Fourth, where the post office was.  She couldn’t stop even twenty minutes in front of the post office, minding her own business and waiting for some one she knew to come along and get her mail for her, without having dozens of men stop and ogle her.  That, of course, was during the first two weeks after she took to going for the mail, though the eternal feminine in Beryl Mae probably thought the insulting glances was going to keep up forever.

“I watched the poor child one day along in the third week, waiting there in front of the post office after the four o’clock mail, and no one hardly ogled her at all except some rude children out from school.  What made it more pitiful, leaning right there against the post office front was Jack Shiels, Sammie Hamilton, and little old Elmer Cox, Red Gap’s three town rowdies that ain’t done a stroke of work since the canning factory closed down the fall before, creatures that by rights should have been leering at the poor child In all her striking beauty.  But, no; the brutes stand there looking at nothing much until Jack Shiels stares a minute at this horse Beryl Mae is on and pipes up:  ’Why, say, I thought Pierce let that little bay runt go to the guy that was in here after polo ponies last Thursday.  I sure did.’  And Sam Hamilton wakes up and says:  ’No, sir; not this one.  He got rid of a little mare that had shoulders like this, but she was a roan with kind of mule ears and one froze off.’  And little old Elmer Cox, ignoring this defenceless young girl with his impudent eyes, he says:  ’Yes, Sam’s right for once.  Pierce tried to let this one go, too, but ain’t you took a look at his hocks!’ Then along comes Dean Duke, the ratty old foreman in Pierce’s stable, and he don’t ogle a bit, either, like you’d expect one of his debased calibre to, but just stops and talks this horse over with ’em and says yes, it was his bad hocks that lost the sale, and he tells ’em how he had told Pierce just what to do to get him shaped up for a quick sale, but Pierce wouldn’t listen to him, thinking he knew it all himself; and there the four stood and gassed about this horse without even seeing Beryl Mae, let alone leering at her.  I bet she was close to shedding tears of girlish mortification as she rode off without ever waiting for the mail.  Things was getting to a pretty pass.  If low creatures lost to all decent instincts, like these four, wouldn’t ogle a girl when she was out for it, what could be expected of the better element of the town?  Still, of course, now and then one or the other of the girls would have a bit of luck to tell of.