There are some men who are big enough to take a woman with a wound in her heart and heal both it and her by their love.  Richard is one of that kind.  What could any woman want more than her work and a man like that?

After Jane had laid her strong-minded head on the hard pillow, that I had had to have concocted out of bats of cotton for her, I laid my face against my own made of the soft breast feathers of a white flock of hovering hen-mothers and wept on their softness.

A light was burning down in the lodge at the gate of Widegables.  He hasn’t gone back to his room to sleep, even when I have Jane’s strong-mindedness in the house with me.  I remember that I gave my word of honor to myself that I wouldn’t try any of my modern emotional experiments on him the first night I slept in this house alone, with only him over there to keep me from dying with primitive woman fright.  I shall keep my word to myself and propose to Richard if my contract with Jane and the Five seems to call for it.  In the meantime if I choose to cry myself to sleep it is nobody’s business.

I wonder if a mist rises up to Heaven every night from all the woman-tears in all the world, and if God sees it, as it clings damp around the hem of His garment, and smiles with such warm understanding that it vanishes in a soft glow of sleep that He sends down to us!

Jane has arisen early several mornings and spent an hour before breakfast composing a masterly and Machiavellian letter of invitation from the Equality League to the inhabitants of Glendale and the surrounding countryside to and beyond Bolivar to attend the rally given by them in honor of the C. & G. Railroad Commission on Tuesday next.  It is to come out to-day in the weekly papers of Glendale, Bolivar, Hillsboro, and Providence, and I hope there will not be so many cases of heart-failure from rage that the gloom of many funerals will put out the light of the rally.  I hope no man will beat any woman in the Harpeth Valley for it, and if he does, I hope he will do it so neither Jane nor I will hear of it.

It was Aunt Augusta who thought up the insulting and incendiary plan of having the rally as an offering of hospitality from the League, and I hope if Uncle Peter is going to die over it he will not have the final explosion in my presence.

Privately I spent a dollar and a half sending a night-letter to Richard all about it and asking him if the Commissioners would be willing to stand for this feminist plank in the barbecue deal.  He had sent me the nicest letter of acceptance from the Board when I had written the invitation to them through him, as coming from the perfectly ladylike feminine population of Glendale, and I didn’t like to get them into a woman-whirlwind without their own consent.  I paid the boy at the telegraph office five dollars not to talk about the matter to a human soul, and threatened to have him dismissed if he did, so the bomb-shell was kept in until this afternoon.