If a woman starts out to be a trained nurse to an epidemic of love-making, she is in great danger of doing something foolish her own self.  I am even glad it is prayer-meeting night for Mr. Haley; he is safe in performing his rituals.  He might misunderstand this mood.

I wonder if I ever was really over in sunny France being wooed and happy!

Of course, I decided the first night I was here that, as circumstances over which I had no control had decreed that Cousin James should stand in the position of enforced protector to me, decent, communistic femino-masculine honor demands that I refrain from any manoeuvers in his direction to attract his thoughts and attention to the feminine me.  I can only meet him on the ordinary grounds of fellowship.  And I suppose the glad-to-see him coming up the street was of the neuter gender, but it was very interesting.

“What did Dodson have to say—­is he coming across?” I demanded of him before he got quite to my gate.

“Not if he can help it,” he answered as he came close and leaned against one of the tall stone posts, so that his grandly shaped head with its ante-bellum squirls of hair was silhouetted against the white-starred wistaria vine in a way that made me frantic for several buckets of monochrome water-colors and a couple of brushes as big as those used for white-washing.  In about ten great splotches I could have done a masterpiece of him that would have drawn artistic fits from the public of gay Paris.  I never see him that I don’t long for a box of pastels or get the ghost of the odor of oil-paint in my nose.

“The whole thing will be settled in a month,” he continued, with a sigh that had a hint of depression in it and an astral shape of Sallie manifested itself hanging on his shoulder.  However, I controlled myself and listened to him.  “There is to be a meeting of the directors of both roads over in Bolivar in a few weeks and they are to come to some understanding.  The line across the river is unquestionably the cheapest and best grade and there is no chance of getting them to run along our bluff—­unless we can show them some advantage in doing so, and I can’t see what that will be.”

“What makes it of advantage for a railroad to run through any given point in a rural community like this, Cousin James?” I asked, with a glow of intellect mounting to my head, the like of which I hadn’t felt since I delivered my Junior thesis in Political Economy with Jane looking on, consumed with pride.

“Towns that have good stock or grain districts around them with good roads for hauling do what is called ‘feeding’ a railroad,” he answered.  “Bolivar can feed both roads with the whole of the Harpeth Valley on that side of the river.  They’ll get the roads, I’m thinking.  Poor old Glendale!”

“Isn’t there anything to feed the monsters this side of the river?” I demanded, indignant at the barrenness of the south side of the valley of Old Harpeth.