And the inane chorus of pleased laughs that followed Polk Hayes’s brainless disposal of the important question in hand made me ashamed of being a woman—­though it was funny.  Still I bided my time and Polk saw the biding, I could tell by the expression in the corners of his eyes that he kept turned away from me.

And in less than a half-hour he was left to my mercies, anything but tender.  Sallie took Nell and Caroline over home to help her decide how wide a band of white it would be decorous for her to sew in the neck of her new black meteor crepe.  I see it coming that we will all have to unite in getting Sallie out of mourning and into the trappings of frivolity soon and I dread it.  It takes so many opinions on any given subject to satisfy Sallie that she ought to keep a tabulated advice-book.

“Evelina,” said Polk, experimentally, after he had seen them safely across the street, and he moved along the steps until he sat against my skirts, “are your family subject to colic?”

“No, they have strong brains instead,” I answered icily.

“Said brains subject to colic, though,” he mused in an impudent undertone.

I laughed:  I couldn’t help it.  One of the dangerous things about Polk is that he gets you comfortable and warm of heart whenever he gets near you.  It wouldn’t matter at all to him if you should freeze later for lack of his warmth, just so he doesn’t know about it.

“Polk,” I began to say in a lovely serious tone of voice, looking him square in the eyes and determined that as we were now on the subject of basic things, like infantile colic, I would have it out with him along all lines, “there is an awful shock coming to you when you realize that—­”

“That in the heat of this erudite and revolutionary discussion, which an evil fate led me to drop in on, I have forgotten to give you this telegram that came for you while I was down at the station shipping some lumber.  Be as easy as you can with me, Evelina, and remember that I am your childhood’s companion when you decide between us.”  With which he handed me a blue telegram.

I opened it hastily and found that it was from Richard: 

     Am coming down to Bolivar with C. & G. Commission.  Be deciding
     about what I wrote you.  Must.

     Richard.

I sat perfectly still for several seconds because I felt that a good strong hand had reached out of the distance and gently grabbed me.  Dickie had bossed me strenuously through two years of the time before I had awakened to the fact that, for his good, I must take the direction of the affairs of him and his kind on my and my kind’s shoulders.

I suppose a great many years of emancipation will have to pass over the heads of women before they lose the gourd kind of feeling at the sight of a particularly broad, strong pair of shoulders.  My heart sparkled at the idea of seeing Dickie again and being browbeaten in a good old, methodical, tender way.  I suppose the sparkle in my heart showed in my eyes, for Polk sat up quickly and took notice of it very decidedly.