Mrs. Gallito was in one of her sighing moods.  In spite of all the methods of protection which she and Hughie had utilized the coyotes still continued to commit their depredations upon her chicken yard and daily to make way with her choicest “broilers” and “fryers.”  Also she had shipped several large consignments of sweet potatoes to the eastern markets and, instead of their being, as usual, snapped up by epicures at enormous prices, they had fallen, through competition with other shippers, almost to the price of the ordinary variety—­desert sweet potatoes, too.

Life, she averred, was hard, almost a failure.  Sometimes things went sort of smooth and you thought it wasn’t so bad, and then everything went wrong.

“Oh, not everything,” said Hanson, with a rather perfunctory attempt at consolation.

“Yes, sir, everything”—­dolefully she creaked back and forth in her rocking-chair—­“everything.  Here’s Gallito, the luckiest man at cards ever was, and he’s been losing steady for three nights, and he’s getting blacker and sourer and stiller every minute.  Oh, if him and Pearl would only talk when things go wrong with ’em.  It would seem so natural and—­and—­humanlike.”

“Back in the old sawdust days,” she continued reminiscently, “when things went wrong in the circus, everybody’d be screaming at each other, calling names and threatening, and often as not throwing anything that came handy.  They’d get it all out of their systems that way, and there was nothing left to curdle.  But to sit and glower and think and think!  Oh, it’s awful!  Why, even Hughie, he’ll talk and pound the piano like he was going to break the poor thing to pieces; but this Spanish way of Pearl and her father!  Oh, my!” Mrs. Gallito shook her head and carefully wiped a tear from her eye, before it could make a disfiguring rivulet down the paint and powder on her cheek.

“It can’t be so much fun, all things considered,” conceded Hanson.

“Fun!” Mrs. Gallito merely looked at him.  “When I think of what life used to be!  Lots of work, but just as much excitement.  Why, I was awful pretty, Mr. Hanson,” a real flush rose on her faded cheek, “and I had lots of admiration, ’deed I did.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” said Hanson.  “I guess I got eyes.”

“And when I married Gallito,” she went on, “I was awful happy.  I guess I was soft, but I always wanted to love some one and be loved a whole lot, and I thought that was what was going to happen, but it didn’t.  I often wonder what he married me for.  But,” her voice was poignant with wistfulness, “I would have liked to have been loved, I would.”

Hanson nodded understandingly and without speaking, this time, an expression of real sympathy in his eyes.  She was weak and silly.  She was dyed and painted and powdered almost to the point of being grotesque, and yet, in voicing the universal longing, she became real, and human, and touching.