Richard replied to the telegram with characteristic directness: 

     Delighted to be in at the fight.  Seven of us rabid suffragists, two
     on the fence, and a half roast pig will convert the other.  Found no
     answer to my question in letter of last Tuesday.  Must!

     RICHARD.

It was nice of Jane to write out and get ready her bomb-shell and then go off with Polk, so as not to see it explode.  But I’m glad she did.  However, I did advise her to take a copy of it along with the reels and the lunch-basket to read to him, as a starter of their day to be devoted to the establishment of a perfect friendship between them.

Polk didn’t look at me even once as I helped pack them and their traps into his Hupp, but Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like Polk in his white flannels, and he and Jane made a picture of perfectly blended tailored smartness as they got ready for the break-away.

There are some men that acquire feminine obligations as rough cheviot does lint and Henrietta is one of Polk’s when it comes to the fishing days.  He takes her so often that she thinks she owns him and all the trout in Little Harpeth, and she landed in the midst of the picnic with her fighting clothes on.

“Where are you and her going at,—­fishing?” she asked in a calmly controlled voice that both of them had heard before, and which made us quail in our boots and metaphorically duck our heads.

“Yes, we—­er thought we would,” he answered with an uncertainty of voice and manner that bespoke abject fear.

“I’ll be d——­ if you shall,” came the explosion, hot and loud.  “I want to go fishing with you, Polk, my own self, and she ain’t no good for nothing any way.  You can’t take her!”

“Henrietta!” I both beseeched and commanded in one breath.

“No, she ain’t no good at all,” was reiterated in the stormy young voice as Henrietta caught hold of the nose of the panting Hupp and stood directly in the path of destruction, if Polk had turned the driving wheel a hair’s breadth.  “Uncle Peter says that she is er going to turn the devil loose in Glendale, so they won’t be no more whisky and no more babies borned and men will get they noses rubbed in their plates, if they don’t eat the awful truck she is er going to teach the women to cook for their husbands.  An’ the men won’t marry no more then at all, and I’ll have to be a old maid like her.”

Now, why did I write weeks ago that I would like to witness an encounter between Jane and Henrietta!  I didn’t mean it, but I got it!

Without ruffling a hair or changing color Jane stepped out of the Hupp and faced the foe.  Henrietta is a tiny scrap of a woman, intense in a wild, beautiful, almost hunted kind of way, and she is so thin that it makes my heart ache.  She is being fairly crushed with the beautiful depending weight of her mother and the responsibility of the twins, and somehow she is most pathetic.  I made a motion to step between her and Jane, but one look in Jane’s face stopped me.