known how hard some of it was and I haven’t been able to eat as much as I usually do thinking how hungry you are?  But isn’t it all worth it?  I think it is.  Alfred Bennett is a very great man and it is right that he should have a very lovely wife to go out into the world with him.  And as lovely as you are I think it is wonderful of you to make all this sacrifice to be still lovelier for him.  I am glad I can help you and it has taught me something to see how—­how faithful a woman can be across years—­and then in this smaller thing!  Now give me Bill and you get your apple and toast.  Don’t forget to take your letter in out of the dew.”  I sat perfectly still and held Billy tighter in my arms as I looked up at his father, and then after I had thought as long as I could stand it, I spoke right out at him as mad as hops and I don’t to this minute know why.

“Nobody in the world ever doubted that a woman could be faithful if she had anything to be faithful to,” I said as I let him take Billy out of my arms at last.  “Faithfulness is what a woman flowers, only it takes a man to pick his posy.”  With which I marched into the house and left him standing with Billy in his arms, I hope dumfounded.  I didn’t look back to see.  I always leave that man’s presence so mad I can never look back at him.  And wouldn’t it make any woman rage to have a man pick out another man for her to be faithful to when she hadn’t made any decision about it her own self?

I wonder just how old Judge Wade is?  I believe I will make up with Aunt Adeline enough before I go to bed to find out why he has never married.

LEAF THIRD

MONUMENT OR TROUSSEAU?

Men are very strange people.  They are like those horrible sums in algebra that you think about and worry about and cry about and try to get help from other women about, and then, all of a sudden, X works itself out into perfectly good sense.  Not that I thought much about Mr. Carter, poor man!  When he wasn’t right around I felt it best to forget him as much as I could, but it seems hard for other women to let you forget either your husband or theirs.

I know now that I really never got any older than the poor, foolish, eighteen-years’ child that Aunt Adeline married off “safe”, all the time I was the “refuge” sort of wife.  I would sit and listen while the other wives talked over the men in utter bewilderment and most times terror, then I would force myself to a little more forgetting and poor Mr. Carter must have suffered the consequences.  But all that was a mild sort of exasperation to what a widow has to go through with in the matter of—­of, well I think hazing is about the best name to give it.

“Molly Carter,” said Mrs. Johnson just day before yesterday, after the white-dress, Judge-Wade episode that Aunt Adeline had gone to all the friends up and down the street to be consoled about, “if you haven’t got sense enough to appreciate your present blissful condition somebody ought to operate on your mind.”