It's maybe two or three days after Christmas--anyhow it's somewheres around the middle of Christmas week--that I first takes notice of a sort of a change coming over Mr. Dallas' feelings. When there's nobody else round but just me and him he acts plumb bothered. His appetite is more picky-and-choosy than it used to be; and by these signs I can tell something is on his mind a-preying. On New Year's Eve he goes forth with his friends for a party but first they all stops by our place for what they calls appetizers and whilst they is gathered together it comes out that him and Miss Bill-Lee is now engaged. Not no regular announcement is made but all of a sudden, seems like, everybody present appears to know how things stand with him and her. Also, Miss Bill-Lee starts in treating him more or less like he belonged to her. I don't scarcely know how to state it in words, but it's like as if up until now she's been holding a piece of property under mortgage but has finally decided for to foreclose on it and is eager for the papers to be fixed up in order for to begin making improvements and alterations. She's what you might call proprietary. Well, I can't say the news is much of a shock to me, seeing what has been the general drift of events since last August when we first got here. But, on the other hand, neither I can't say that, considering everything, I'm actually overcome with joyfulness on Mr. Dallas' personal account. I can't keep from thinking to myself that he's fixing to marry himself off into a mighty different set of folks from the kind he was born and brung up amongst. And I can't keep from thinking what a sight of difference there is betwixt this here Miss DeWitt and Miss Henrietta Farrell, which, as I said before, he was courting her before we moved to New York. One of 'em sort of puts me in mind of a rosebud picked out of the garden in the dew of the morning and the other, which I means by that, Miss De Witt, reminds me of one of these here big pale magnolia blooms which has growed on the edge of a swamp. I ain't meaning no disrespect by having these thoughts; only I can't keep from having 'em. I reckon it's having them ideas floating round in my head which makes me study Mr. Dallas 'specially close that New Year's Eve. For all that he's laughing and joking and carrying on, I figures that way down deep insides of him he ain't entirely happy over what's come out. By my calculations, he ain't got the true feelings which a forthcoming bridegroom should have. As near as I can judge, he ain't hopeful so much as he's sort of resignated. Also and furthermore, likewise, he's got a kind of a puzzled-up beflusterated look on his face as if he'd been took up short by something he wasn't exactly expecting to happen so soon, if at all. It ain't exactly bewildedment and it ain't exactly distressfulness; but it's something that's distant kinsfolks to both of 'em. CHAPTER XIV _Oiled Skids_