Even more bewildering was the change in Cherry.  There was a certain hardening that impressed Alix at once.  There was a weary sort of patience, a disillusioned concession to the drabness of married life.  Alix, after meeting some of the other wives at the mine—­there were but five or six—­saw that Cherry had been affected by them.  There was general sighing over the housework, a mild conviction that men were all selfish and unreasonable.  “And I must say,” Alix’s first letter to her father admitted, “that the men here are all dogs, except the ones that are under dogs!”

But she allowed the younger sister to see nothing of this.  Indeed, Cherry so brightened under the stimulus of Alix’s companionship that Martin told her that she was more like her old self than she had been for months.  Joyously she divided her responsibilities with Alix, explaining the difficulties of marketing and housekeeping, and joyously Alix assumed them.  Her vitality infected the whole household, and, indeed, the mine as well.  She flirted, cooked, entertained, talked incessantly; she bullied Martin and laughed at him, and it did him good.

Perhaps, thought Alix, rather appalled at Cherry’s attitude, Cherry had been too young for wifehood.  Sometimes she spoiled and humoured Martin, and sometimes quarrelled with him childishly, scolding and fretting for her own way, and angry with conditions over which neither he nor she had any control.  Alix was surprised to see the old pout, and hear the old phrase of Cherry’s indulged girlhood:  “I don’t think this is any fun!”

“Anne isn’t one half as clever or as pretty as Cherry, but she’ll make a better wife!” was Alix’s conclusion.  She gave them spirited accounts of Anne’s affair.  “He’s a nice little academic fellow,” she said of Justin Little.  “If he had a flatiron in each hand he’d probably weigh close to a hundred pounds!  He’s a—­well, a sort of damp-looking youth, if you know what I mean!  I always want to take a crash towel and dry him off!”

“Fancy Anne with a shrimp like that!” Cherry said, with a proud look at her own man’s fine height.

“Anne was delicious!” Alix further revealed.  “They used to take dignified walks on Sundays.  I used to tease her, and she’d get so mad she’d ask Dad to ask me to be more refined.  She said that Mr. Little was a most unusual man, and it was belittling to his dignity to have me suppose that a man and a woman couldn’t have an intellectual friendship.  This in May, my dear, and after the thing was settled and Anne had cried, and written notes, and Justin had gone to Dad and asked where he could buy a second-hand revolver—­”

“Oh, Alexandra Strickland, you’re making up!” Cherry went back naturally to the old nursery phrase.

“Honestly—­cross my heart!” Alix assured her.  “That’s the way they managed it; they solemnly discussed it and worked it out on paper, and Justin’s mother called on Anne—­she’s an awful old girl, too, she looks like a totem pole—­and Anne called on his aunts, and then he asked Dad, ‘as Anne’s male relative,’ he said, and it was all settled.  And then—­then Anne became the mushiest thing I ever saw!  And not only mushy, Cherry, but proudly and openly mushy.  She’d catch Justin’s hand up, at the table, and say ‘Frenny—­’”