Still, I am glad he stayed and that everybody has been giving him a party and that Nell is always there, for he hasn't had time to notice how I'm treating business and coddling—
Jane and Polk and Nell and Caroline and Lee and everybody else, including Sallie and the Dominie, have been all over my house all day and into the scandalous hours of the night, which in Glendale begin at eleven o'clock and pass the limit at twelve, and I don't see how they stand so much of not being alone with each other. It is wearing me out.
I had positively decided on my own side steps for the scene of my proposal to the Crag, under the honeysuckle vine that still has a few brave and hearty blossoms to encourage me, with the harvest moon look ing on, but moons and honeysuckle blossoms wait for no man and no woman especially. They are both fading, and I've never got the spot to myself more than a minute at a time yet. The Crag, with absolutely no knowledge of my intentions, except it may be a psychic one, sits there every night and smokes and looks out at Old Harpeth and maddens me, while some one of the others walks in and out and around and about and sits down beside him, where I want to be.
And as for the day time, I am so busy all day long, providing for this perpetual house-party, that I am dead to even friendship by night. Jane is doing over Glendale from city limits to the river, and I have to spend my time keeping the dear town from finding out what is being done to it.
She is hunting out everybody's pet idea or ideal for some sort of change or improvement to his, especially his, native town, and then leading him gently up to accomplishing it so that he will think he has done it entirely by himself, but will tell the next man he meets that there is nothing in the world like a tine energetic woman with good horse sense. In fact, Jane is courting the entire male population in a most scandalous fashion, and they'll be won before they know it.
"Now, that Confederate monument ought to have been built long ago out of that boulder from the river instead of hauling in a slicked-up granite slab that would er made the Glendale volunteers of '61 feel uncomfortable like they would do in the beds in the city hotels. Great idea of mine and that Yankee girl's—great idea—hey?" sputtered Uncle Peter, after Jane had spent the evening down with him and Aunt Augusta.
"It is a fine idea, Uncle Peter," I agreed with a concealed giggle.
"I've subscribed the first five dollars of the fifty for hauling, setting up and inscrib ing it, and we are going to let the women give half of it out of the egg-money they have got in that Equality Quilting Society—some kind of horse sense epidemic has broken out in this town, horse sense, Evelina, hey?" And he went on down the street perfectly delighted at having at last accomplished his pet scheme. He thought of it as exclusively his own by now, of course.
And the monument is just the beginning of what is going to begin in Glendale. Jane says so.
"There could be no better place than this rural community to try out a number of theories I have had in political economy as related to the activities of women, Evelina," she said to me to-day, looking at me in a benign and slightly confused way from behind her glasses. "Mr. Hayes and I were just talking some of them over to-night, and he seems so interested in seeing me institute some of the most important ones. How could you have ever thought such a man as he is lacking in seriousness of purpose, dear?"