"'All right,' I says, 'only, of course, Chet Timmins is a good friend and neighbour of mine, even if he is a male, so I hope you won't mind his dropping in now and again from time to time, just to say howdy and eat a meal.' And she flusters me again with her coolness. "'No,' she says, 'I won't mind, but I know what you're counting on, and it won't do either of you any good. I'm above the appeal of a man's mere presence,' she says, 'for I've thrown off the age--long subjection; but I won't mind his coming. I shall delight to study him. They're all alike, and one specimen is as good as another for that. But neither of you need expect anything,' she says, 'for the wrongs of my sisters have armoured me against the grossness of mere sex appeal.' Excuse me for getting off such things, but I'm telling you how she talked. "'Oh, shucks!' I says to myself profanely, for all at once I saw she wasn't talking her own real thoughts but stuff she'd picked up from the well-known lady friends of Mrs. W.B. Hemingway. I was mad all right; but the minute I get plumb sure mad I get wily. 'I was just trying you out,' I says. 'Of course you are right!' 'Of course I am,' says she, 'though I hardly expected you to see it, you being so hardened a product of the ancient ideal of slave marriage.' "At them words it was pretty hard for me to keep on being wily, but I kept all right. I kept beautifully. I just laughed and said we'd have Chet Timmins up for supper, and she laughed and said it would be amusing. "And it was, or it would have been if it hadn't been so sad and disgusting. Chet, you see, had plumb crumpled the first time he ever set eyes on her, and he's never been able to uncrumple. He always choked up the minute she'd come into the room, and that night he choked worse'n ever because the little devil started in to lead him on--aiming to show me how she could study a male, I reckon. He couldn't even ask for some more of the creamed potatoes without choking up--with her all the time using her eyes on him, and telling him how a great rough man like him scared 'poor little me.' Chet's tan bleaches out a mite by the end of winter, but she kept his face exactly the shade of that new mahogany sideboard I got, and she told him several times that he ought to go see a throat specialist right off about that choking of his.