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nary methods would bring her a spouse, and she had tried strategy, and people knew she had tired it; she knew she was laughed at, was a byword in Rossville, but that made her the more determined to succeed. It was the super-strategy she now awaited.

That afternoon when Asa Beebe brought her half a cord of wood-delivering wood was only another of Asa's various pursuits and said, "Well, Myry, I spose you'll be going to see the new bill?" she said, yes, she expected to go; but she had, nevertheless, not the faintest presentiment of what was lying ahead.

Asa had one of his coughing spells and asked if he could take a drink. She asked him if he had his own cup, and he modestly produced a collapsible one, and as she watched him drink, she thought how the winter had wasted him. He was such a poor, abject creature, what with his one leg and his one eye and his one (if it were indeed one) lung. But she was not sorry for him, and it did not occur to her to tip him for stacking the wood, though it brought on a second attack of his cough, just as it did not occur to her to offer him one of the fresh doughnuts that filled a big yellow bowl on the kitchen-table. Yet he lived alone, and was too poor to know the taste of decent food.

That night she was pleased from the first with the movie program, though the great idea was to come not from the Maurice Mordaunt, but from the four-ace comedy reel. An actionfarce of simple theme, it showed a widow triumphing over all other females in the matrimonial race, and triumphing through the mere fact of her being a widow. In other words, the polite biological fiction that the

male pursues the female ceases to be fiction and becomes fact in just one case the case of the charmer who has already been possessed. Not that Myra did not already know this as well as you or I, but some truths are like the pattern on the wall-paper or the design on the table-cloth, too familiar to be perceived. Myra had not read a certain novel in which an Irishwoman observes that it is a wonder any woman ever has a chance to marry till she has become a widow, and yet this was just the thought that, near the end of the comedy reel, flashed upon her. And on its heels came another, with the bulky velocity of a bounding collie knocking down a small child. Myra glanced about her, for every great discovery brings the attendant query, Why does n't some one else see it, too? But every one was intent upon the screen, where by means of a vision the widow was having a little review of all her recent suitors. At that moment Myra also was visited by a vision. It was of one sole suitor, really of half a suitor, with one leg and one eye and one lung. Anybody could tell you that Asa Beebe would never survive another winter. He did not look as if he could live through the present spring, active though he was, for he was an essentially active man.

Well, here was the way for an alert spinster to acquire widowhood inside of a year, and any woman on earth, once she becomes a widow- An indistinct, but thrilling, fantasy followed, so thrilling that Myra suddenly sat back and closed her eyes.

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kitchen, though usually by that hour she was out in the shop part of her little cottage.

"Asa, you carry milk for other folks, but do you ever drink it yourself?" she asked. "It would be an awful' good thing for your cough."

Asa tilted back his hat, and his one eye gazed with some surprise at the tall, flat spinster rinsing a pail at the sink.

"Well, no, Myry, I stick pretty close to coffee. It sets me up better 'n anything I know of."

"Me, I like coffee, too. Come to think of it, here's some left, still warm, if you'd care to have it. I always have to throw it away; it 's no good next day, and it hurts my heart if I take it more 'n once a day."

Asa's eye stared more roundly, but when, in addition to the cup of creamy coffee, and no mention made of his having his own cup, she added two doughnuts, even his glass eye seemed to take on the surplus of amazement from his real one. Myra continued busy at the sink, and at last he found his tongue and thanked her. And while he ate and drank he asked her how she had liked the program last night.

"The feature was fair, but the comedy like to put me to sleep." watched him stealthily.

She

"Why, I liked it. I liked to have died laughing when they all got chasing each other in them automobiles," he said apologetically. She was relieved. Plainly the idea had not brushed wings against Asa in its passage to her. She pressed another doughnut on him, and when he asked if she had made them, she said, yes, but she did n't get much time for cooking; the store took most of her atten

tion. "Business is pretty brisk lately."

He said that was lucky, but guessed she knew how to manage, and, stimulated by the coffee and food, he made bold to chuckle rather knowingly, and she laughed in a way to convey shy acquiescence. Then the young girl who always opened up the store called her to an early customer.

Thereafter she continued to insinuate her friendliness, though Asa little guessed its nature. And this, I think, best explains the completeness of the modesty of Asa.

I don't know whether this modesty was congenital; I only know he had it at the time when the freight-car of sheep coupled into his leg instead of into the tank-car just ahead. He was then fifteen. His eye was lost at a Fourth of July picnic, when in the company of two small white boys and one big colored boy he prematurely exploded a cannon cracker. These accidents had a lack of dignity, and that may have had something to do with his loss of confidence. The tuberculosis was certainly congenital, his father, two brothers, and a sister having died of it; but until Asa was thirty, with him it took the form of bronchitis. He had that in his boyhood; it was a common thing for him to lose his voice for a week at a time, and he was always hoarse all through the winter. It is hard to assert a personality when one is voiceless. It seems to me that he was handicapped at the start by this unromantic malady, and that all the other accidents and ills befell him as a consequence of that original impediment. Unable to recite his lessons at school, he was called a blockhead, and he soon abandoned education; his mother needed him, anyhow. He began to do odd jobs and then odder

ones, and now they were his sole means of subsistence, though he always had great schemes in his head. Asa was the crack schemer of the Rossville region. His ingenuities embraced the invention of a combined can-opener and hair-curler, the discovery of gold in Lipman's Creek, the grafting of pears and peaches and apples all on one tree; but my memory fails. On his ramshackle little estate at the edge of town he had followed such pursuits as chicken-raising, mushrooming, umbrella-mending, skate-sharpening, collie-breeding, collecting junk, painting signs, bottoming chairs, shoeing horses; again my memory is inadequate. His outside activities were frankly uncountable, though I recall plumbing, cockroach-and-rat exterminating, scissors-grinding, fish-peddling, and selling ice-cream cones. Yes, and of course he had sold books. Well, many consumptives are restless and active like Asa. Some wit had invented the phrase parody, "Busy as Asa Beebe," and it had become a local saying. And "Go ask Asa" was another, for he was a great prognosticator as to weather, elections, and crops. His prophecies were always wrong. It was a trick of the wags to send him clippings and ads for get-rich-quick schemes, which he always took seriously and went to work upon gratefully.

Well, Asa was not colorless; he was just futile. He had sudden self-assurances, as suddenly extinguished, and followed by self-effacings, so that he seemed always in a state of apology for having presumed, much in the fashion of the collies he raised. His one eye came to have the look of a wagging tail, wagging exuberantly, then in propitiation.

had not been so heartless to him, for he was a doomed man. It was none other than Doctor Cranberry who gave the verdict, "Not more than a year at the outside." He had said it this very spring, though not to Asa, of course.

But even before his disease got such headway Asa had never thought of any woman wanting him for a husband. Consequently, Myra Spells worked on his gratitude all through April and into May without his ever remotely guessing her motives, although Mrs. Leff Rotchett, next door to Myra, was already passing out her interpretations of the maiden lady's sudden human

ness.

At last the time came when Myra felt that in some way she must manipulate Asa's proposal for her hand. She had done all she could with feeding and chatting and mending,—one morning she had made him take off his coat while she patched the sleeve, but the actual proposal must come from him, though she must first put the words into his mouth. words into his mouth. In this fortune favored her by sending her a birthday.

That evening when Asa came to put up the screens, a job she had got him to do, timing it nicely, he found the little kitchen-table set out with refreshments for two. Heretofore she had given him merely hand-outs, snacks, and therefore he did n't connect the festivities with himself, and he was about to leave when she asked him to stay and help her celebrate.

"Why, I'm all dirty; I ain't even shaved," stammered the connubial decoy, but Myra laughed gaily.

""T ain't a party. I just feel lonesome, and the friend I invited could n't come after all, and it seems a shame to waste the cake, and it fresh. You

But for the last year or two people and me 's old friends by now, Asa;

you stay and make me feel like it is my birthday." And then she said she did n't think other folks did enough for him; they did n't appreciate him. But she appreciated him.

ing her, hummed, "Here comes the bride." But her aquiline profile only sharpened, her black eyes continued to glitter; in a few weeks, as she knew, the tauntings would cease, for she would be "Mrs. Beebe."

He flushed to the roots of his hair, but a snowy towel and some perfumed soap, thrust into his hand, silenced him. When he had washed at the sink, she gave him a rose for his lapel, and they sat down to the cake. "Why, what's that?" he asked sud- helplessly; but he was not so abject as

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Yes, Myra dared to be a June bride. Did she mind what the town would say? I only know that she faced unflinchingly the ridicule that burst forth at her announcement. How right is the philosopher who says that will is nothing, that motive is all! Myra Myra could look clear past the ridicule to the day when Rossville would be singing another tune. I don't say that she actually visualized Asa's gravestone on the far side of the marriage-altar. Hers was rather the position of the doctor, who, without desiring man's illness, yet alertly profits by it. Or did she more nearly resemble the undertaker? So I pass over, as did Myra, the rich harvest of gibes her engagement brought, and cull only a few. "Well, any woman can get some husband," "She tried all the others first; we got to give her that credit," "It's more blessed to give than to receive," and the like. Children in the streets, see

I pass over the wedding, too. It was very quiet. Asa, fed up and renovated in the meantime, made a respectable, if not commanding, figure. He seemed dazed, and he often looked at Myra

one might have supposed, for she had carefully given him the impression that he had wooed and won her despite maidenly resistance, and the notion added to his self-esteem. They went away for a week, and returned to live at Myra's, though Asa did not give up his own domicile. And Myra knew that when the time came, the sale of this little property of his would help meet certain expenditures, though delicacy forbids me more than to hint at what she meant by that.

Well, why deny it? A married woman commands a special respect the mere spinster never enjoys. True, in a town where every one knew every one else there were few chances for Myra's new name to be used, but now and then it happened that goods were sent to her, delivered to "Mrs. Asa Beebe," and her checks were to the account of "Mrs. Asa Beebe"; she never signed "Myra Beebe" or "Myra Spells Beebe." People laughed, but she comported herself with dignity, and gradually the more sarcastic of the gibes ceased. Indeed, some comments were, though cynically, commendatory, as, "Well, Myra acts like she actually likes him!" "She does keep him neat and spruce." "She must have seen things in him we others missed." That was so.

There were two people in Rossville

whose attitude Myra watched with particular care. There was no doubt of it, Jeffrey Simms did take off his hat more gallantly now, and once he walked along the street with her, something that had not happened in a decade. She tasted triumph that day.

The other person she watched was Hattie Buck. Hattie was the most popular woman in Rossville, at least unofficially. This was despite certain laxities not of morals, but of conventions. At forty Hattie was what she had been at fifteen, twenty, and thirty, a child of nature. Impetuous, plump, merry, pretty, with a charming blue eye, gay, wilful hair, and bubbling laugh, she had gone a careless way, generous in love and money. Every small town has its Hattie Buck. She was so good-natured that there would have been no fun in saying anything mean about her, anyhow, and no one desired to say it. It was thought that she liked Jeffrey Simms, and lately it was being said that Jeffrey acted as if he liked Hattie. But he was that kind of man of whom one never can tell.

So fall approached, a significant season for Myra, the first act, as she saw it, of a drama of three acts, of which the others were to be the winter and the spring. For, remember, it was Doc Cranberry who had said Asa could not live more than one year.

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At heart like other males, when Myra got him a pongee suit and a Panama hat and silk socks and gay ties, Asa gained assurance; his ambitions also moved up to a higher plane. He sold off his junk and gave up his odd jobs, devoting himself to transactions and schemes and-but that was his secret -to inventions. At times he brought

small sums to her, and she pretended gratitude, though they did not half meet her outlay on him. But being prepared to pay for her own private scheme, she went on dressing him for his part, and the town was visibly impressed by the transformation. Well, they were to see that what she was to lose was worthy of being mourned; she was to be a widow really bereaved, not easy to console. So she very carefully brought into respectful relief those activities of Asa's, and, “I guess I 'd better consult him," she would say, or, "Maybe Asa could tell you," or, "Well, if he is n't too busy, I'll ask him." At the same time she developed a line of public solicitude for his health. "If I don't watch him, he overdoes," "I ’ll see if he feels well enough," or, "I 've found a new medicine that 's helping him a heap."

"I'll

Asa was grateful, he admired her, he believed in her; so he supposed he loved her, as he supposed she loved him, strange as that still seemed. His happiness was quite visible.

"A man does need a wife, Myry. I was runnin' to seed. I been doing that since I was born till you married me, and I did n't know why it was."

"Yes, Asa, a man does need a woman to look after him. Some women neglect their husbands, but I 'm not that sort."

In September she sold her two lots and got a small second-hand car, which he drove. "He must be out in the air," she explained.

Rossville had by now passed into a state of complete mystification. To repudiate its former opinion of Myra was impossible; the demonstration of her character had been before them too long. "She must have something up her sleeve," they said; but what

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