The lady grinned.
"Many of us has forgot our womanhood in the dear, dead past," she confessed. "Me? Sure! Where's that photo album. Where did I put that album anyway? That's the way in this house. Get things straightened up once, you can't find a single one you want. Look where I put it now!" She demolished an obelisk of books on the table, one she had lately constructed with some pains, and brought the album that had been its pedestal. "Get me there, do you?"
It was the photograph of a handsome young woman in the voluminous riding skirt of years gone by, before the side-saddle became extinct. She held a crop and wore an astoundingly plumed bonnet. Despite the offensive disguise, one saw provocation for the course adopted by the late Lysander John Pettengill at about that period.
"Very well—now get me here, after I'd been on the ranch only a month." It was the same young woman in the not too foppish garb of a cowboy. In wide-brimmed hat, flannel shirt, woolly chaps, quirt in hand, she bestrode a horse that looked capable and daring.
"Yes, sir, I hadn't been here only a month when I forgot my womanhood like that. Gee! How good it felt to get into 'em and banish that sideshow tent of a skirt. I'd never known a free moment before and I blessed Lysander John for putting me up to it. Then, proud as Punch, what do I do but send one of these photos back to dear old Aunt Waitstill, in Fredonia, thinking she would rejoice at the wild, free life I was now leading in the Far West. And what do I get for it but a tear-spotted letter of eighteen pages, with a side-kick from her pastor, the Reverend Abner Hemingway, saying he wishes to indorse every word of Sister Baxter's appeal to me—asking why do I parade myself shamelessly in this garb of a fallen woman, and can nothing be said to recall me to the true nobility that must still be in my nature but which I am forgetting in these licentious habiliments, and so on! The picture had been burned after giving the Reverend his own horrified flash of it, and they would both pray daily that I might get up out of this degradation and be once more a good, true woman that some pure little child would not be ashamed to call the sacred name of mother.
"Such was Aunt Waitstill—what names them poor old girls had to stand for! I had another aunt named Obedience, only she proved to be a regular cinch-binder. Her name was never mentioned in the family after she slid down a rainspout one night and eloped to marry a depraved scoundrel who drove through there on a red wagon with tinware inside that he would trade for old rags. I'm just telling you how times have changed in spite of the best efforts of a sanctified ministry. I cried over that letter at first. Then I showed it to Lysander John, who said 'Oh, hell!' being a man of few words, so I felt better and went right on forgetting my womanhood in that shameless garb of a so-and-so—though where aunty had got her ideas of such I never could make out—and it got to be so much a matter of course and I had so many things to think of besides my womanhood that I plumb forgot the whole thing until this social upheaval in Red Gap a few years ago.
"I got to tell you that the wild and lawless West, in all matters relating to proper dress for ladies, is the most conservative and hidebound section of our great land of the free and home of the brave—if you can get by with it. Out here the women see by the Sunday papers that it's being wore that way publicly in New York and no one arrested for it, but they don't hardly believe it at that, and they wouldn't show themselves in one, not if you begged them to on your bended knees, and what is society coming to anyway? You might as well dress like one of them barefooted dancers, only calling 'em barefooted must be meant like sarcasm—and they'd die before they'd let a daughter of theirs make a show of herself like that for odious beasts of men to leer at, and so on—until a couple years later Mrs. Henrietta Templeton Price gets a regular one and wears it down Main Street, and nothing objectionable happens; so then they all hustle to get one—not quite so extreme, of course, but after all, why not, since only the evil-minded could criticise? Pretty soon they're all wearing it exactly like New York did two years ago, with mebbe the limit raised a bit here and there by some one who makes her own. But again they're saying that the latest one New York is wearing is so bad that it must be confined to a certain class of women, even if they do get taken from left to right at Asbury Park and Newport and other colonies of wealth and fashion, because the vilest dregs can go there if they have the price, which they often do.
"Red Gap is like that. With me out here on the ranch it didn't matter what I wore because it was mostly only men that saw me; but I can well remember the social upheaval when our smartest young matrons and well-known society belles flung modesty to the chinook wind and took to divided skirts for horseback riding. My, the brazen hussies! It ain't so many years ago. Up to that time any female over the age of nine caught riding a horse cross-saddle would have lost her character good and quick. And these pioneers lost any of theirs that wasn't cemented good and hard with proved respectability. I remember hearing Jeff Tuttle tell what he'd do to any of his womenfolks that so far forgot the sacred names of home and mother. It was startling enough, but Jeff somehow never done it. And if he was to hear Addie or one of the girls talking about a side-saddle to-day he'd think she was nutty or mebbe wanting one for the state museum. So it goes with us. My hunch is that so it will ever go.
"The years passed, and that thrill of viciousness at wearing divided skirts in public got all rubbed off—that thrill that every last one of us adores to feel if only it don't get her talked about—too much—by evil-minded gossips. Then comes this here next upheaval over riding pants for ladies—or them that set themselves up to be such. Of course we'd long known that the things were worn in New York and even in such modern Babylons as Spokane and Seattle; but no woman in Red Gap had ever forgot she had a position to keep up, until summer before last, when we saw just how low one of our sex could fall, right out on the public street.
"She was the wife of a botanist from some Eastern college and him and her rode a good bit and dressed just alike in khaki things. My, the infamies that was intimated about that poor creature! She was bony and had plainly seen forty, very severe-featured, with scraggly hair and a sharp nose and spectacles, and looked as if she had never had a moment of the most innocent pleasure in all her life; but them riding pants fixed her good in the minds of our lady porch-knockers. And the men just as bad, though they could hardly bear to look twice at her, she was that discouraging to the eye; they agreed with their wives that she must be one of that sort.