When Flora caught sight of Kate, staring at her, behind me, she flopped up one of those spectacles with handles, and her eyebrows went up at the same time. She froze like an ice-pack. I allow the two women didn’t look much alike, but I wouldn’t let anybody snub my wife if I could help it, so I introduced them, calling Kate Mrs. Saul Timney, the way she liked to have me. Flora sprang something about being “charmed,” and then said she had to be going. Said she hoped I’d call, but nothing about Kate, I noticed. I followed her off with my eyes, she was so pretty and high-toned now, the first decent white woman I’d talked to in years, and, honest—oh, well, hang it, a man’s got no license to be ashamed of his wife, but I don’t know—Kate did look kind of funny in that red Mother Hubbard and the ermine cape and straw hat, with moccasins and five strings of glass beads—doggone it, I hated myself for being ashamed of her, which I wasn’t, really, only somehow she looked different than she did before. I tried to get her away, but she stood stock-still watching Flora, who had walked off down to the cloak department at the end of the aisle. But if Kate don’t want to move, all hell and an iceberg can’t budge her, and I stood waiting to think how I’d square myself with her, feeling guilty enough, though I was just as fond of my wife as ever. All of a sudden Kate made a break for the counter where Flora Donovan was buying a cloak. The clerks all knew Kate by this time, and the floorwalker chap would come on the hop-skip-and-a-jump and turn the shop upside down for her. So when she came up behind Miss Donovan, and pointed to three or four expensive heavy cloaks and threw out a sack of double eagles to pay for ’em, letting the clerk take out what he wanted, she had everybody around staring at her, Flora included. I could see well enough what was in Kate’s mind. She had seen that I was just a little ashamed of her, for some reason, and that Flora didn’t think she was in her class. Kate wanted to show that she was the real thing, and a sure lady, and the only way she knew how to prove it was to beat Flora at buying. Kate didn’t exactly want to put it over her, she only wanted to make good as the wife of Saul Timney.