She had come for the letters herself, she told Bowser, because she was expecting a whole bag full, and her grandfather's rheumatism kept him at home. Installed in the post-office chair, behind the railing that enclosed the sanctum of pigeon-holes, she amused herself by watching the customers while she waited for the mail-train.
"It's like looking into a kaleidoscope," she told Bowser in one of the pauses of trade. "Every one who comes in gives me a different point of view and combination of opinions. Now, those valentines! I was thinking what old-fashioned things those little lace-paper affairs are, and wondering how anybody could possibly get up any thrills over them, when in walked Miss Anastasia Dill. Prim and gentle as ever, isn't she? Still getting her styles from Godey's Lady's Books of the early sixties; she must draw on their antiquated love stories for her sentiment, too, for she seemed lost in admiration of those hearts and darts. What do you suppose is Miss Anastasia's idea of a lover?"
Marion rattled on with all of a débutante's reckless enthusiasm for any subject under discussion. "Wouldn't he be as odd and old-fashioned as the lace valentines themselves? She'd call him a suitor, wouldn't she? I wonder if she ever had one."
Then Bowser, piecing together the fragmentary gossip of fifteen years, told Marion all he knew of Miss Anastasia's gentle romance; and Marion, idly clasping and unclasping the little Yale pin on her jacket, gained another peep into the kaleidoscope of human experiences.
"I have read of such devotion to a memory," she said when the story was done, "but I never met it in the flesh. What a pity he died while he was on such a high pedestal in her imagination. If he had lived she would have discovered that there are no such paragons, and all the other sons of Adam needn't have suffered by comparison. So she's an old maid simply because she put her ideal of a lover so high in the clouds nobody could live up to it! Dear old Miss Anastasia!"
Bowser pulled his beard. "Such couples make me think of these here lamps with double wicks," he said. "They hardly ever burn along together evenly. One wick is sure to flare up higher than the other; you either have to keep turning it down and get along with a half light or let it smoke the chimney—maybe crack it—and make things generally uncomfortable. But here comes somebody, Miss Marion, who's burned along pretty steady, and that through three administrations. It's her brag that she's had three husbands and treated them just alike, even to the matter of tombstones. 'Not a pound difference in the weight nor a dollar in the price,' she always says."
The newcomer was a fat, wheezy woman, spattered with mud from the hem of her skirt to the crown of her big crape bonnet, which had tipped on one side with the jolting of the wagon.
"Well, Jim Bowser!" she exclaimed, catching sight of the valentines. "Ef you ain't got out them silly, sentimental fol-de-rols again! My nephew, Jason Potter,—that's my second husband's sister's son, you know,—spent seventy-five cents last year to buy one of them silly things to send to his girl; and I says to him, 'Jason,' says I, 'ef I'd been Lib Meadows, that would 'uv cooked your goose with me! Any man simple enough to waste his substance so, wouldn't make a good provider.' I ought to know—I've been a wife three times."
This, like all other of Mrs. Power's conversational roads, led back to the three tombstones, and started a flow of good-natured badinage on the subject of matrimony, which continued long after she had taken her noisy departure. "Well!" exclaimed Bud Hines, as the big crape bonnet went jolting down the road, "I guess there's three good men gone that could tell why heaven is heaven."
"Why?" asked Cy Akers.