“And amid all this quaint girlish enterprise and secret infamy was the problem of Hetty Tipton.  Hetty had been a friend and a problem of mine for seven years, or ever since she come back from normal to teach in the third-grade grammar school; a fine, clean, honest, true-blue girl, mebbe not as pretty you’d say at first as some others, but you like her better after you look a few times more, and with not the slightest nonsense about her.  That last was Hetty’s one curse.  I ask you, what chance has a girl got with no nonsense about her?  Hetty won my sympathy right at the start by this infirmity of hers, which was easily detected, and for seven years I’d been trying to cure her of it, but no use.  Oh, she was always took out regular enough and well liked, but the gilded youth of Red Gap never fought for her smiles.  They’d take her to parties and dances, turn and turn about, but they always respected her, which is the greatest blight a man can put on one of us, if you know what I mean.  Every man at a party was always careful to dance a decent number of times with Hetty and see that she got back to her seat; and wasn’t it warm in here this evening, yes, it was; and wouldn’t she have a glass of the punch—­No, thank you—­then he’d gallop off to have some fun with a mere shallow-pated fool that had known how from the cradle.  It was always a puzzle to me, because Hetty dressed a lot better than most of them, knowing what to wear and how, and could take a joke if it come slow, and laid herself out to be amiable to one and all.  I kind of think it must be something about her mentality.  Maybe it is too mental.  I can’t put her to you any plainer than to say that every single girl in town, young and old, just loved her, and not one of them up to this time had ever said an unkind or feminine thing about her.  I guess you know what that would mean of any woman.

“Hetty was now coming twenty-nine—­we never spoke of this, but I could count back—­and it’s my firm belief that no man had ever proposed marriage or anything else on earth to her.  Wilbur Todd had once endeavoured to hold her hand out on the porch at a country-club dance and she had repulsed him in all kindness but firmly.  She told him she couldn’t bring herself to permit a familiarity of that sort except to the man who would one day lead her to the altar, which is something I believe she got from writing to a magazine about a young girl’s perplexities.  And here, in spite of her record, this poor thing had dared to raise her eyes to none other than this Mr. Burchell Daggett.  There was something kind of grand and despairing about the impudence of it when you remember these here trained efficiency experts she was competing with.  Yet so it was.  She would drop in on me after school for a cup of tea and tell me frankly how distinguished his manner was and what shapely features he had and what fine eyes, and how there was a certain note in his voice at times, and had I ever noticed that one stubborn lock of hair that stuck out back of his left ear?  Of course that last item settled it.  When they notice that lock of hair you know the ship has struck the reef and all hands are perishing.