A Woman Named Smith

by Marie Conway Oemler

"Business-woman-of-a-certain-age, general-utility, will-stand-wear-and-tear clothes. Not a stitch of Hyndshousey clothes among them. No happy, glad-I'm-alive-and-a woman clothes. Here's where you cease to look merely useful, respectable, and responsible, and begin to look the Lady of the Castle. There's quite as much philosophy and good morals in looking like a butterfly as there is in resembling a caterpillar."

"Why should I have more clothes?" I demanded.

"Because." And she added, with a fleeting smile, "And then catch your hare."

"Alicia!" said I, scandalized. "Alicia Gaines, do you realize I am thirty-six years old?"

"You wouldn't be if you just had sense enough to forget to remember it." This resentfully.

"No? Would you mind telling me how I might become such an accomplished forgetter?"

"Why, there's nothing easier! When you really wish to forget to remember something, Sophy, all you have to do is to remember to forget it!" And then, with real earnestness: "Sophy, it's the better part of wisdom to look like the job you want to hold down. Your job is holding down Hynds House. And we are up against things, Sophy, you and I. We have got to win out because it means—all this." Her eyes swept over the beautiful old room with an immense pride and affection.

"We have just got to keep Hynds House, if only to teach these Hyndsville women a lesson." She spoke after a pause. "Sophy, they flatten their ears and arch their backs at sight of us; and whenever there's a good chance for a wipe of a paw, why, we catch it across the nose. Now I," she admitted frankly, "am naturally full of cat feelings myself. I will not do what you want to do—walk off looking aggrieved, after the fashion of Old Dog Tray. I will repay in kind, retaliate in true lady-cat manner. And these,"—she began to smile—"these shall be our weapons of offense and defense. It will be a gorgeous struggle; however, my forebears came from Kilkenny!"

I laughed, but indeed I did not feel any too optimistic. Holding down Hynds House was no easy task, and the town was not disposed to make it easier for us. While we had been busy renovating, while our hands were so full of work that every minute was occupied, we hadn't felt our isolation. It was only when we had time to pause and look around us, that the stubborn, quiet hostility of the town's attitude to the new owner of Hynds House was borne in upon us.

Not that anything overt was done by any one. Nor was there the slightest breach of politeness: they were as punctiliously polite when chance brought us into contact with them, as well-bred folk are to strangers whose further acquaintance they have no desire to cultivate. The vestrymen of St. Polycarp's had expressed their appreciation of Miss Smith's action in promptly dropping the suit against them; she was welcome to come and worship God in their church, and to do her duty by the heathen. Such ladies as happened to belong to the missionary society spoke to us pleasantly in the church vestibule. The minister and his wife were as sincerely, duteously courteous. But that was all. Not a house in Hyndsville opened its doors to us. They simply would not accept the interloper that the malignity of the Scarlett Witch had put in possession of that which should have gone back to Richard's last heir, or failing him, to Richard Geddes.