[Illustration:  “Is this right?” he asked]

“Is this right?” he asked, as he gently took me in his arms, hollowed his shoulder for a place for my head, and leaning against the old gate he began to swing me gently to and fro, his cheek against my hair and humming Aunt Dilsie’s

“Swing low sweet chariot, fer to carry me home.”

It was.

I know now what I want and I am going to have it.  I’ll fight the whole world with naked hands for him.  And I’m also going to find some way to get him with all his absurd niceties of honor intact, just because that will make him happier.

I’ll begin at the beginning and some way unclasp those gourdy tendrils that Sallie has been strangling him with.  I will bunch all the rest of his feminine collection and take them on my own hands.  I’m going to make a Governor out of him, and then a United States Senator and finally a Supreme Judge.  Help!  Think of the old Mossback being a progressive, but that’s my party and Jane’s.

I know he is going to hate terribly to have me ask him to marry me, and I hate to hurt him so, but it is my duty to get Jane’s fifty thousand dollars so the Five may be as happy as I am to-night; only there aren’t five other Crags.  I know it will be a life-long mortification to him to have me do it, but he lost his chance to-night grand-mothering me.  Still, I did turn my lips away.  I was not quite ready then—­I am now.

If he wants to go on wearing clothes like that I’m going to let him, even on the Senate floor, but I can’t ever stand for Cousin Jasmine to cut his hair any more.  I want to do it myself, and I’m going to tell her so, and why.  She and I have cried over that miniature of the lost young Confederate cousin of hers and she’ll understand me.

But as I think it over—­it always is best to be kind, and I believe I’ll let him get through this rally—­it’s just four days—­free and happy man.

I don’t know whether to go in and wake up Jane or not.  I would like to go to sleep with that kiss revelation between us, but maybe it is my duty to the Five to extract some data from her while it is fresh, on the foam.  I am afraid it is going to go hard with her, but somehow I have a newborn faith in Polk that makes me feel that he will make it as easy as he can for her.

Isn’t it a glorious thing to realize that neither she nor I will have to sit and be tortured by waiting to see what those men are going to do?

CHAPTER IX

DYNAMITE

When a man injures a woman’s feelings by any particular course of conduct to which she objects, the maternal in her rises to the surface and she treats and forgives him as she would a naughty child,—­but a man makes any kind of woman-affront into a lover’s quarrel.  That is what masculine Glendale has been doing to its women folks for four days, and I believe everybody has been secretly enjoying it.