And all at once I says to myself, What did I care so I got some fun out of it. Other girls was always doing this. Lena Curtsy would have talked with him in a minute. Maybe I could get him to ask me to go to a show. I couldn't go, but I thought I'd like to make him ask me. "Was you lonesome?" I ask', looking at him. He didn't say anything. He just looked at me, smiling a little. I thought I'd better say a little more. I wanted him to know I wasn't a stick, but that I was in for fun, like a city girl. "You don't look like a chap that'd be lonesome very long," I says. "Not if you can get acquainted _this_ easy." He kept looking at me, and smiling a little. "Tell me," he says, "do you live about here?" "Me? Right here. I'm the original Maud Muller," I says. "And what do you do besides rake hay?" he says. I couldn't think what else Maud Muller done. I hadn't read it since Fifth Reader. So I says: "Well, she don't often get a chance to talk with traveling gentlemen." "That's good," he says, "but--I wouldn't have thought it." I see he meant because I done it so easy and ready, so I give him as good as he sent. "Wouldn't _you_?" I says. "Well, I s'pose you get a chance to flirt with strange girls every town you strike." He looked at me again, not smiling now, but just awfully interested. I see I was interesting him down to the ground. Lena Curtsy couldn't have done it better. "Flirt," he says over. "What do you mean by 'flirt'?" I laughed at him. "You're a pretty one to ask that," I says, "with them eyes." "Oh," he says serious, "then you like my eyes?" "I never said so," I gave him. "Do you like mine?" "Let me look at them," he said. We stopped in the road, and I looked him square in the eye. I can look anybody in the eye. I looked at him straight, till he laughed and moved on. He seemed to be thinking about something. "I think I like you best when you sing," he said. "Won't you sing something else?" "Sure," I says, and wheeled around in the road, and kind of skipped backward. And I sung: "Oh, oh, oh, oh! Pull down the blinds! When they hear the organ play-ing They won't know what we are say-ing. Pull down the blinds!" I'd heard it to the motion-picture show the week before. I was thankful he could see I was up on the nice late tunes. "I wonder," says the man, "if you can tell me something. I wonder if you can tell me what made you pick out this song to sing to me, and what made you sing that other song when you were alone?" All at once the morning come back. Ever since I met him I'd forgot the morning and the sun, and the way I'd felt when I started out alone. I'd just been thinking about myself, and about how I could make him think I was cute and up-to-date. Now it was just as if the country road opened up again, and there I was on it, opposite the Dew Drop Inn, just being me. I looked up at him. "Honest," I says, "I don't know. I guess it was because I wanted you to think I was fun."