“I’m going to get that position!” she announced, “it’ll do me _worlds_ of good--” (It did!) “And mother is satisfied to stay with Aunt Clarice--she entertains all the time, you know--and I am going to wear an orchid chiffon frock, made up over silver cloth, perhaps, and Signor Paggi says I will sometimes be expected to bow too, and that Madame Heilbig will pay me well, and I mean to save--because Leslie says all her income comes from money her father saved--it is the only safety for a single woman, and capital is really the husband of an old maid, don’t you know? Or would you wear lavender? I thought of a brocade, and I could wear artificial violets because they would look like real ones back of the footlights, and with my name, they might be sort of romantic, and I can wear violet too, and--” I sat and listened, and honestly she went on for a half hour like that. Then she said, “Hear about Ben Forbes?” “Yes,” I answered. “Simply _romantic_!” “Um hum--” “Taking him to the Boboli Gardens, and all that--_artful_, you know. . . . _Think_ of having a proposal in one of those arched-over pathways in that heavenly place! _Oh!_” “Probably won’t,” I said. “He will too,” Viola disagreed, “_she’ll fix it_! . . . Look here, did you hear about his cook!” I hadn’t, and I said so quickly, because I was interested. “In the letter before this last one,” said Viola, “I think it came yesterday, he told Leslie--oh, in detail, my dear!--about his ranch, and the way the ranch house looked and all that. Made it _frightfully_ attractive, told her about the patio, what is a patio, anyway?” “Enclosed court,” I answered, “I think they have them in some of the ranch houses in the southwest. They are sort of Mexican--” “I see; well, he told her about that, and about how the sunsets looked on the mountains, it was a perfect _love_ of a letter, but what I was getting at was this--he said he had a one-eyed Chinese cook who could spit eight feet. Can you imagine Leslie with _that_?” I laughed. It did seem awfully funny. Viola laughed too, but as Leslie had, which was not in an entirely kind way, and then she went on to say almost exactly what Leslie had said about her. “It’ll be the _making_ of her,” she said (and it was!), “but I never would have believed she would allow herself to care for a man who lives in the middle of nowhere. However, _nothing_ turns out as one expects it to. I guess I ought to leave you?” “You ought to,” I agreed, “but I don’t suppose you will--” “Oh, do come have tea with me,” said Leslie from the doorway, and I gave up. We went to her room to find her bed covered with the veils which she had been trying on over her flowered toque. “A woman _should_ look her best,” she said, but she flushed and avoided looking at us as she said it. “When will he be here?” asked Viola.