"It makes a difference, doesn't it?" I asked, looking him straight in
the eye. He understood.

"Look here, Bob," he said, "I was going to tell you. I couldn't help
it. I'll play fair with you, but I'm going in to win. She is the

'one particular' for me."
"All right," said I. "It's a fair field. There are no rights for you

to encroach upon."
On Thursday afternoon Miss Ashton invited North and myself to have tea

in her apartment. He was devoted, and she was more charming than
usual. By avoiding the subject of caps I managed to get a word or two

into and out of the talk. Miss Ashton asked me in a make-
conversational tone something about the next season's tour.

"Oh," said I, "I don't know about that. I'm not going to be with
Binkley & Bing next season."

"Why, I thought," said she, "that they were going to put the Number
One road company under your charge. I thought you told me so."

"They were," said I, "but they won't.. I'll tell you what I'm going
to do. I'm going to the south shore of Long Island and buy a small

cottage I know there on the edge of the bay. And I'll buy a catboat
and a rowboat and a shotgun and a yellow dog. I've got money enough

to do it. And I'll smell the salt wind all day when it blows from the
sea and the pine odor when it blows from the land. And, of course,

I'll write plays until I have a trunk full of 'em on hand.
"And the next thing and the biggest thing I'll do will be to buy that

duck-farm next door. Few people understand ducks. I can watch 'em
for hours. They can march better than any company in the National

Guard, and they can play 'follow my leader' better than the entire
Democratic party. Their voices don't amount to much, but I like to

hear 'em. They wake you up a dozen times a night, but there's a
homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to me than the

cry of 'Fresh strawber-rees!' under your window in the morning when
you want to sleep.

"And," I went on, enthusiastically, "do you know the value of ducks
besides their beauty and intelligence and order and sweetness of

voice? Picking their feathers gives you an unfailing and never
ceasing income. On a farm that I know the feathers were sold for $400

in one year. Think of that! And the ones shipped to the market will
bring in more money than that. Yes, I am for the ducks and the salt

breeze coming over the bay. I think I shall get a Chinaman cook, and
with him and the dog and the sunsets for company I shall do well. No

more of this dull, baking, senseless, roaring city for me."
Miss Ashton looked surprised. North laughed.

"I am going to begin one of my plays tonight," I said, "so I must be
going." And with that I took my departure.

A few days later Miss Ashton telephoned to me, asking me to call at
four in the afternoon.

I did.
"You have been very good to me," she said, hesitatingly, "and I

thought I would tell you. I am going to leave the stage."
"Yes," said I, "I suppose you will. They usually do when there's so

much money."
"There is no money," she said, "or very little. Our money is almost

gone."
"But I am told," said I, "that he has something like two or ten or

thirty millions--I have forgotten which."
"I know what you mean," she said. "I will not pretend that I do not.

I am not going to marry Mr. North."
"Then why are you leaving the stage ?" I asked, severely. "What else

can you do to earn a living?"
She came closer to me, and I can see the look in her eyes yet as she

spoke.
"I can pick ducks," she said.

We sold the first year's feathers for $350.
A POOR RULE

I have always maintained, and asserted ime to time, that woman is no
mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and

interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon
credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As

"Harper's Drawer" used to say in bygone years: "The following good
story is told of Miss --, Mr. --, Mr. --and Mr. --."

We shall have to omit "Bishop X" and "the Rev. --," for they do not
belong.

In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern
Pacific. A reporter would have called it a "mushroom" town; but it

was not. Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.
The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the

passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine
hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences.

The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, "black-waxy" mud, and
mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an about-to-

be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-
day train by which you might leave, creditably sustained the role of

charity.
The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while

it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and
perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of

Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and
sorghum.

There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which
the family lived. From the kitchen extended a "shelter" made of poles

covered with chaparral brush. Under this was a table and two benches,
each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry. Here was

set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans, soda-
biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.

Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as "Betty," but denied
to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with

salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours a
Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided

him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian banquets, I
place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.

Ileen Hinkle!
The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she

had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography that
Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have indorsed the

phonography.
Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to

invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through
Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grand-

stand--or was it a temple?--under the shelter at the door of the
kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with a

little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the
barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died

in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you
put it under the arch, and she took it.

I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I
must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: A Philosophical

Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. It
is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive

conceptions of beauty--roundness and smoothness, I think they are,
according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as

for smoothness--the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother
she becomes.

Ileen was a strictlyvegetablecompound, guaranteed under the Pure
Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam. She

was a fruit-stand blonde-strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her
eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm