[Waifs] [Editorial] Modernize hyphenation and spelling

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@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
 			<p>“Then why do they become infuriated and make threats of lynching?” asked the New Yorker.</p>
 			<p>“To assure the motorman,” answered the tall man, “that he is safe. If they really wanted to do him up they would go into the houses and drop bricks on him from the third-story windows.”</p>
 			<p>“New Yorkers are not cowards,” said the other man, a little stiffly.</p>
-			<p>“Not one at a time,” agreed the tall man, promptly. “You’ve got a fine lot of single-handed scrappers in your town. I’d rather fight three of you than one; and I’d go up against all the Gas Trust’s victims in a bunch before I’d pass two citizens on a dark corner, with my watch chain showing. When you get rounded up in a bunch you lose your nerve. Get you in crowds and you’re easy. Ask the ‘L’ road guards and George B. Cortelyou and the tintype booths at Coney Island. Divided you stand, united you fall. <i xml:lang="la">E pluribus nihil</i>. Whenever one of your mobs surrounds a man and begins to holler, ‘Lynch him!’ he says to himself, “Oh, dear, I suppose I must look pale to please the boys, but I will, forsooth, let my life insurance premium lapse to-morrow. This is a sure tip for me to play Methuselah straight across the board in the next handicap.’</p>
+			<p>“Not one at a time,” agreed the tall man, promptly. “You’ve got a fine lot of single-handed scrappers in your town. I’d rather fight three of you than one; and I’d go up against all the Gas Trust’s victims in a bunch before I’d pass two citizens on a dark corner, with my watch chain showing. When you get rounded up in a bunch you lose your nerve. Get you in crowds and you’re easy. Ask the ‘L’ road guards and George B. Cortelyou and the tintype booths at Coney Island. Divided you stand, united you fall. <i xml:lang="la">E pluribus nihil</i>. Whenever one of your mobs surrounds a man and begins to holler, ‘Lynch him!’ he says to himself, “Oh, dear, I suppose I must look pale to please the boys, but I will, forsooth, let my life insurance premium lapse tomorrow. This is a sure tip for me to play Methuselah straight across the board in the next handicap.’</p>
 			<p>“I can imagine the tortured feelings of a prisoner in the hands of New York policemen when an infuriated mob demands that he be turned over to them for lynching. ‘For God’s sake, officers,’ cries the distracted wretch, ‘have ye hearts of stone, that ye will not let them wrest me from ye?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Sorry, Jimmy,’ says one of the policemen, ‘but it won’t do. There’s three of us⁠—me and Darrel and the plain-clothes man; and there’s only sivin thousand of the mob. How’d we explain it at the office if they took ye? Jist chase the infuriated aggregation around the corner, Darrel, and we’ll be movin’ along to the station.’ ”</p>
 			<p>“Some of our gatherings of excited citizens have not been so harmless,” said the New Yorker, with a faint note of civic pride.</p>

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@@ -77,10 +77,10 @@
 					<p>I handed this letter to my wife. After she had read it her face grew extremely long, and there were tears in her eyes.</p>
 					<p>“The mean old thing!” she exclaimed indignantly. “I’m sure your pieces are just as good as they ever were. And it doesn’t take you half as long to write them as it did.” And then, I suppose, Louisa thought of the checks that would cease coming. “Oh, John,” she wailed, “what will you do now?”</p>
 					<p>For an answer I got up and began to do a polka step around the supper table. I am sure Louisa thought the trouble had driven me mad; and I think the children hoped it had, for they tore after me, yelling with glee and emulating my steps. I was now something like their old playmate as of yore.</p>
-					<p>“The theatre for us to-night!” I shouted; “nothing less. And a late, wild, disreputable supper for all of us at the Palace Restaurant. Lumpty-diddle-de-dee-de-dum!”</p>
+					<p>“The theatre for us tonight!” I shouted; “nothing less. And a late, wild, disreputable supper for all of us at the Palace Restaurant. Lumpty-diddle-de-dee-de-dum!”</p>
 					<p>And then I explained my glee by declaring that I was now a partner in a prosperous undertaking establishment, and that written jokes might go hide their heads in sackcloth and ashes for all me.</p>
 					<p>With the editor’s letter in her hand to justify the deed I had done, my wife could advance no objections save a few mild ones based on the feminine inability to appreciate a good thing such as the little back room of Peter Hef⁠—no, of Heffelbower &amp; Co’s. undertaking establishment.</p>
-					<p>In conclusion, I will say that to-day you will find no man in our town as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I. My jokes are again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure in my wife’s confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while Guy and Viola play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor without fear of the ghastly tormentor who used to dog their steps, notebook in hand.</p>
+					<p>In conclusion, I will say that today you will find no man in our town as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I. My jokes are again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure in my wife’s confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while Guy and Viola play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor without fear of the ghastly tormentor who used to dog their steps, notebook in hand.</p>
 					<p>Our business has prospered finely. I keep the books and look after the shop, while Peter attends to outside matters. He says that my levity and high spirits would simply turn any funeral into a regular Irish wake.</p>
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@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@
 			<p>“I love the West,” said the girl irrelevantly. Her eyes were shining softly. She looked away out the car window. She began to speak truly and simply without the gloss of style and manner: “Mamma and I spent the summer in Denver. She went home a week ago because father was slightly ill. I could live and be happy in the West. I think the air here agrees with me. Money isn’t everything. But people always misunderstand things and remain stupid⁠—”</p>
 			<p>“Say, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Marshal,” growled the glum-faced man. “This isn’t quite fair. I’m needing a drink, and haven’t had a smoke all day. Haven’t you talked long enough? Take me in the smoker now, won’t you? I’m half dead for a pipe.”</p>
 			<p>The bound travelers rose to their feet, Easton with the same slow smile on his face.</p>
-			<p>“I can’t deny a petition for tobacco,” he said, lightly. “It’s the one friend of the unfortunate. Good-bye, Miss Fairchild. Duty calls, you know.” He held out his hand for a farewell.</p>
+			<p>“I can’t deny a petition for tobacco,” he said, lightly. “It’s the one friend of the unfortunate. Goodbye, Miss Fairchild. Duty calls, you know.” He held out his hand for a farewell.</p>
 			<p>“It’s too bad you are not going East,” she said, reclothing herself with manner and style. “But you must go on to Leavenworth, I suppose?”</p>
 			<p>“Yes,” said Easton, “I must go on to Leavenworth.”</p>
 			<p>The two men sidled down the aisle into the smoker.</p>

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@@ -8,15 +8,15 @@
 	<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
 		<section id="out-of-nazareth" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
 			<h2 epub:type="title">Out of Nazareth</h2>
-			<p>Okochee, in Georgia, had a boom, and J. Pinkney Bloom came out of it with a “wad.” Okochee came out of it with a half-million-dollar debt, a two and a half per cent. city property tax, and a city council that showed a propensity for traveling the back streets of the town. These things came about through a fatal resemblance of the river Cooloosa to the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern tourist. Okochee felt that New York should not be allowed to consider itself the only alligator in the swamp, so to speak. And then that harmless, but persistent, individual so numerous in the South⁠—the man who is always clamoring for more cotton mills, and is ready to take a dollar’s worth of stock, provided he can borrow the dollar⁠—that man added his deadly work to the tourist’s innocent praise, and Okochee fell.</p>
+			<p>Okochee, in Georgia, had a boom, and J. Pinkney Bloom came out of it with a “wad.” Okochee came out of it with a half-million-dollar debt, a two and a half percent city property tax, and a city council that showed a propensity for traveling the back streets of the town. These things came about through a fatal resemblance of the river Cooloosa to the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern tourist. Okochee felt that New York should not be allowed to consider itself the only alligator in the swamp, so to speak. And then that harmless, but persistent, individual so numerous in the South⁠—the man who is always clamoring for more cotton mills, and is ready to take a dollar’s worth of stock, provided he can borrow the dollar⁠—that man added his deadly work to the tourist’s innocent praise, and Okochee fell.</p>
 			<p>The Cooloosa River winds through a range of small mountains, passes Okochee and then blends its waters trippingly, as fall the mellifluous Indian syllables, with the Chattahoochee.</p>
 			<p>Okochee rose, as it were, from its sunny seat on the post-office stoop, hitched up its suspender, and threw a granite dam two hundred and forty feet long and sixty feet high across the Cooloosa one mile above the town. Thereupon, a dimpling, sparkling lake backed up twenty miles among the little mountains. Thus in the great game of municipal rivalry did Okochee match that famous drawing card, the Hudson. It was conceded that nowhere could the Palisades be judged superior in the way of scenery and grandeur. Following the picture card was played the ace of commercial importance. Fourteen thousand horsepower would this dam furnish. Cotton mills, factories, and manufacturing plants would rise up as the green corn after a shower. The spindle and the flywheel and turbine would sing the shrewd glory of Okochee. Along the picturesque heights above the lake would rise in beauty the costly villas and the splendid summer residences of capital. The naphtha launch of the millionaire would spit among the romantic coves; the verdured hills would take formal shapes of terrace, lawn, and park. Money would be spent like water in Okochee, and water would be turned into money.</p>
-			<p>The fate of the good town is quickly told. Capital decided not to invest. Of all the great things promised, the scenery alone came to fulfilment. The wooded peaks, the impressive promontories of solemn granite, the beautiful green slants of bank and ravine did all they could to reconcile Okochee to the delinquency of miserly gold. The sunsets gilded the dreamy draws and coves with a minting that should charm away heart-burning. Okochee, true to the instinct of its blood and clime, was lulled by the spell. It climbed out of the arena, loosed its suspender, sat down again on the post-office stoop, and took a chew. It consoled itself by drawling sarcasms at the city council which was not to blame, causing the fathers, as has been said, to seek back streets and figure perspiringly on the sinking fund and the appropriation for interest due.</p>
+			<p>The fate of the good town is quickly told. Capital decided not to invest. Of all the great things promised, the scenery alone came to fulfilment. The wooded peaks, the impressive promontories of solemn granite, the beautiful green slants of bank and ravine did all they could to reconcile Okochee to the delinquency of miserly gold. The sunsets gilded the dreamy draws and coves with a minting that should charm away heartburning. Okochee, true to the instinct of its blood and clime, was lulled by the spell. It climbed out of the arena, loosed its suspender, sat down again on the post-office stoop, and took a chew. It consoled itself by drawling sarcasms at the city council which was not to blame, causing the fathers, as has been said, to seek back streets and figure perspiringly on the sinking fund and the appropriation for interest due.</p>
 			<p>The youth of Okochee⁠—they who were to carry into the rosy future the burden of the debt⁠—accepted failure with youth’s uncalculating joy. For, here was sport, aquatic and nautical, added to the meagre round of life’s pleasures. In yachting caps and flowing neckties they pervaded the lake to its limits. Girls wore silk waists embroidered with anchors in blue and pink. The trousers of the young men widened at the bottom, and their hands were proudly calloused by the oft-plied oar. Fishermen were under the spell of a deep and tolerant joy. Sailboats and rowboats furrowed the lenient waves, popcorn and ice-cream booths sprang up about the little wooden pier. Two small excursion steamboats were built, and plied the delectable waters. Okochee philosophically gave up the hope of eating turtle soup with a gold spoon, and settled back, not ill content, to its regular diet of lotus and fried hominy. And out of this slow wreck of great expectations rose up J. Pinkney Bloom with his “wad” and his prosperous, cheery smile.</p>
 			<p>Needless to say J. Pinkney was no product of Georgia soil. He came out of that flushed and capable region known as the “North.” He called himself a “promoter”; his enemies had spoken of him as a “grafter”; Okochee took a middle course, and held him to be no better nor no worse than a “Yank.”</p>
 			<p>Far up the lake⁠—eighteen miles above the town⁠—the eye of this cheerful camp-follower of booms had spied out a graft. He purchased there a precipitous tract of five hundred acres at forty-five cents per acre; and this he laid out and subdivided as the city of Skyland⁠—the Queen City of the Switzerland of the South. Streets and avenues were surveyed; parks designed; corners of central squares reserved for the “proposed” opera house, board of trade, lyceum, market, public schools, and “Exposition Hall.” The price of lots ranged from five to five hundred dollars. Positively, no lot would be priced higher than five hundred dollars.</p>
 			<p>While the boom was growing in Okochee, J. Pinkney’s circulars, maps, and prospectuses were flying through the mails to every part of the country. Investors sent in their money by post, and the Skyland Real Estate Company (J. Pinkney Bloom) returned to each a deed, duly placed on record, to the best lot, at the price, on hand that day. All this time the catamount screeched upon the reserved lot of the Skyland Board of Trade, the opossum swung by his tail over the site of the exposition hall, and the owl hooted a melancholy recitative to his audience of young squirrels in opera house square. Later, when the money was coming in fast, J. Pinkney caused to be erected in the coming city half a dozen cheap box houses, and persuaded a contingent of indigent natives to occupy them, thereby assuming the role of “population” in subsequent prospectuses, which became, accordingly, more seductive and remunerative.</p>
-			<p>So, when the dream faded and Okochee dropped back to digging bait and nursing its two and a half per cent. tax, J. Pinkney Bloom (unloving of checks and drafts and the cold interrogatories of bankers) strapped about his fifty-two-inch waist a soft leather belt containing eight thousand dollars in big bills, and said that all was very good.</p>
+			<p>So, when the dream faded and Okochee dropped back to digging bait and nursing its two and a half percent tax, J. Pinkney Bloom (unloving of checks and drafts and the cold interrogatories of bankers) strapped about his fifty-two-inch waist a soft leather belt containing eight thousand dollars in big bills, and said that all was very good.</p>
 			<p>One last trip he was making to Skyland before departing to other salad fields. Skyland was a regular post-office, and the steamboat, <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i>, under contract, delivered the mail bag (generally empty) twice a week. There was a little business there to be settled⁠—the postmaster was to be paid off for his light but lonely services, and the “inhabitants” had to be furnished with another month’s homely rations, as per agreement. And then Skyland would know J. Pinkney Bloom no more. The owners of these precipitous, barren, useless lots might come and view the scene of their invested credulity, or they might leave them to their fit tenants, the wild hog and the browsing deer. The work of the Skyland Real Estate Company was finished.</p>
 			<p>The little steamboat <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i> was about to shove off on her regular up-the-lake trip, when a rickety hired carriage rattled up to the pier, and a tall, elderly gentleman, in black, stepped out, signaling courteously but vivaciously for the boat to wait. Time was of the least importance in the schedule of the <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i>; Captain MacFarland gave the order, and the boat received its ultimate two passengers. For, upon the arm of the tall, elderly gentleman, as he crossed the gangway, was a little elderly lady, with a gray curl depending quaintly forward of her left ear.</p>
 			<p>Captain MacFarland was at the wheel; therefore it seemed to J. Pinkney Bloom, who was the only other passenger, that it should be his to play the part of host to the boat’s new guests, who were, doubtless, on a scenery-viewing expedition. He stepped forward, with that translucent, child-candid smile upon his fresh, pink countenance, with that air of unaffected sincerity that was redeemed from bluffness only by its exquisite calculation, with that promptitude and masterly decision of manner that so well suited his calling⁠—with all his stock in trade well to the front; he stepped forward to receive Colonel and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peyton Blaylock. With the grace of a grand marshal or a wedding usher, he escorted the two passengers to a side of the upper deck, from which the scenery was supposed to present itself to the observer in increased quantity and quality. There, in comfortable steamer chairs, they sat and began to piece together the random lines that were to form an intelligent paragraph in the big history of little events.</p>
@@ -92,7 +92,7 @@
 					<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock reclined at ease. Few royal ladies have held their royal prerogative with the serene grace of the petted Southern woman. The Colonel, with an air as gallant and assiduous as in the days of his courtship, and J. Pinkney Bloom, with a ponderous agility half professional and half directed by some resurrected, unnamed, long-forgotten sentiment, formed a diversified but attentive court. The currant wine⁠—wine home made from the Holly Springs fruit⁠—went round, and then J. Pinkney began to hear something of Holly Springs life.</p>
 					<p>It seemed (from the conversation of the Blaylocks) that the Springs was decadent. A third of the population had moved away. Business⁠—and the Colonel was an authority on business⁠—had dwindled to nothing. After carefully studying the field of opportunities open to capital he had sold his little property there for eight hundred dollars and invested it in one of the enterprises opened up by the book in Okochee.</p>
 					<p>“Might I inquire, sir,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom, “in what particular line of business you inserted your coin? I know that town as well as I know the regulations for illegal use of the mails. I might give you a hunch as to whether you can make the game go or not.”</p>
-					<p>J. Pinkney, somehow, had a kindly feeling toward these unsophisticated representatives of by-gone days. They were so simple, impractical, and unsuspecting. He was glad that he happened not to have a gold brick or a block of that western Bad Boy Silver Mine stock along with him. He would have disliked to unload on people he liked so well as he did these; but there are some temptations toe enticing to be resisted.</p>
+					<p>J. Pinkney, somehow, had a kindly feeling toward these unsophisticated representatives of bygone days. They were so simple, impractical, and unsuspecting. He was glad that he happened not to have a gold brick or a block of that western Bad Boy Silver Mine stock along with him. He would have disliked to unload on people he liked so well as he did these; but there are some temptations toe enticing to be resisted.</p>
 					<p>“No, sir,” said Colonel Blaylock, pausing to arrange the queen’s wrap. “I did not invest in Okochee. I have made an exhaustive study of business conditions, and I regard old settled towns as unfavorable fields in which to place capital that is limited in amount. Some months ago, through the kindness of a friend, there came into my hands a map and description of this new town of Skyland that has been built upon the lake. The description was so pleasing, the future of the town set forth in such convincing arguments, and its increasing prosperity portrayed in such an attractive style that I decided to take advantage of the opportunity it offered. I carefully selected a lot in the centre of the business district, although its price was the highest in the schedule⁠—five hundred dollars⁠—and made the purchase at once.”</p>
 					<p>“Are you the man⁠—I mean, did you pay five hundred dollars for a lot in Skyland” asked J. Pinkney Bloom.</p>
 					<p>“I did, sir,” answered the Colonel, with the air of a modest millionaire explaining his success; “a lot most excellently situated on the same square with the opera house, and only two squares from the board of trade. I consider the purchase a most fortuitous one. It is my intention to erect a small building upon it at once, and open a modest book and stationery store. During past years I have met with many pecuniary reverses, and I now find it necessary to engage in some commercial occupation that will furnish me with a livelihood. The book and stationery business, though an humble one, seems to me not inapt nor altogether uncongenial. I am a graduate of the University of Virginia; and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock’s really wonderful acquaintance with belles-lettres and poetic literature should go far toward insuring success. Of course, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock would not personally serve behind the counter. With the nearly three hundred dollars I have remaining I can manage the building of a house, by giving a lien on the lot. I have an old friend in Atlanta who is a partner in a large book store, and he has agreed to furnish me with a stock of goods on credit, on extremely easy terms. I am pleased to hope, sir, that <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock’s health and happiness will be increased by the change of locality. Already I fancy I can perceive the return of those roses that were once the hope and despair of Georgia cavaliers.”</p>
@@ -138,7 +138,7 @@
 					<p>“Go to the devil,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom, still pensive.</p>
 					<p>And now, upon the left bank, they caught a glimpse of a white village, high up on the hills, smothered among green trees. That was Cold Branch⁠—no boom town, but the slow growth of many years. Cold Branch lay on the edge of the grape and corn lands. The big country road ran just back of the heights. Cold Branch had nothing in common with the frisky ambition of Okochee with its impertinent lake.</p>
 					<p>“Mac,” said J. Pinkney suddenly, “I want you to stop at Cold Branch. There’s a landing there that they made to use sometimes when the river was up.”</p>
-					<p>“Can’t,” said the captain, grinning more broadly. “I’ve got the United States mails on board. Right to-day this boat’s in the government service. Do you want to have the poor old captain keelhauled by Uncle Sam? And the great city of Skyland, all disconsolate, waiting for its mail? I’m ashamed of your extravagance, J. P.”</p>
+					<p>“Can’t,” said the captain, grinning more broadly. “I’ve got the United States mails on board. Right today this boat’s in the government service. Do you want to have the poor old captain keelhauled by Uncle Sam? And the great city of Skyland, all disconsolate, waiting for its mail? I’m ashamed of your extravagance, J. P.”</p>
 					<p>“Mac,” almost whispered J. Pinkney, in his danger-line voice, “I looked into the engine room of the <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Dixie Belle</i> a while ago. Don’t you know of somebody that needs a new boiler? Cement and black Japan can’t hide flaws from me. And then, those shares of building and loan that you traded for repairs⁠—they were all yours, of course. I hate to mention these things, but⁠—”</p>
 					<p>“Oh, come now, J. P.,” said the captain. “You know I was just fooling. I’ll put you off at Cold Branch, if you say so.”</p>
 					<p>“The other passengers get off there, too,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom.</p>

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@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
 	<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
 		<section id="round-the-circle" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
 			<h2 epub:type="title">Round the Circle</h2>
-			<p>“Find yo’ shirt all right, Sam?” asked <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Webber, from her chair under the live-oak, where she was comfortably seated with a paper-back volume for company.</p>
+			<p>“Find yo’ shirt all right, Sam?” asked <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Webber, from her chair under the live-oak, where she was comfortably seated with a paperback volume for company.</p>
 			<p>“It balances perfeckly, Marthy,” answered Sam, with a suspicious pleasantness in his tone. “At first I was about ter be a little reckless and kick ‘cause ther buttons was all off, but since I diskiver that the button holes is all busted out, why, I wouldn’t go so fur as to say the buttons is any loss to speak of.”</p>
 			<p>“Oh, well,” said his wife, carelessly, “put on your necktie⁠—that’ll keep it together.”</p>
 			<p>Sam Webber’s sheep ranch was situated in the loneliest part of the country between the Nueces and the Frio. The ranch house⁠—a two-room box structure⁠—was on the rise of a gently swelling hill in the midst of a wilderness of high chaparral. In front of it was a small clearing where stood the sheep pens, shearing shed, and wool house. Only a few feet back of it began the thorny jungle.</p>

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@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@
 			<p>“And Captain Carruthers tells me that you speak the Spanish language like a native. Why have you hidden this accomplishment from me? Is there anything you do not know?”</p>
 			<p>Now, Carruthers was an idiot. No doubt he (Trysdale) had been guilty (he sometimes did such things) of airing at the club some old, canting Castilian proverb dug from the hotchpotch at the back of dictionaries. Carruthers, who was one of his incontinent admirers, was the very man to have magnified this exhibition of doubtful erudition.</p>
 			<p>But, alas! the incense of her admiration had been so sweet and flattering. He allowed the imputation to pass without denial. Without protest, he allowed her to twine about his brow this spurious bay of Spanish scholarship. He let it grace his conquering head, and, among its soft convolutions, he did not feel the prick of the thorn that was to pierce him later.</p>
-			<p>How glad, how shy, how tremulous she was! How she fluttered like a snared bird when he laid his mightiness at her feet! He could have sworn, and he could swear now, that unmistakable consent was in her eyes, but, coyly, she would give him no direct answer. “I will send you my answer to-morrow,” she said; and he, the indulgent, confident victor, smilingly granted the delay. The next day he waited, impatient, in his rooms for the word. At noon her groom came to the door and left the strange cactus in the red earthen jar. There was no note, no message, merely a tag upon the plant bearing a barbarous foreign or botanical name. He waited until night, but her answer did not come. His large pride and hurt vanity kept him from seeking her. Two evenings later they met at a dinner. Their greetings were conventional, but she looked at him, breathless, wondering, eager. He was courteous, adamant, waiting her explanation. With womanly swiftness she took her cue from his manner, and turned to snow and ice. Thus, and wider from this on, they had drifted apart. Where was his fault? Who had been to blame? Humbled now, he sought the answer amid the ruins of his self-conceit. If⁠—</p>
+			<p>How glad, how shy, how tremulous she was! How she fluttered like a snared bird when he laid his mightiness at her feet! He could have sworn, and he could swear now, that unmistakable consent was in her eyes, but, coyly, she would give him no direct answer. “I will send you my answer tomorrow,” she said; and he, the indulgent, confident victor, smilingly granted the delay. The next day he waited, impatient, in his rooms for the word. At noon her groom came to the door and left the strange cactus in the red earthen jar. There was no note, no message, merely a tag upon the plant bearing a barbarous foreign or botanical name. He waited until night, but her answer did not come. His large pride and hurt vanity kept him from seeking her. Two evenings later they met at a dinner. Their greetings were conventional, but she looked at him, breathless, wondering, eager. He was courteous, adamant, waiting her explanation. With womanly swiftness she took her cue from his manner, and turned to snow and ice. Thus, and wider from this on, they had drifted apart. Where was his fault? Who had been to blame? Humbled now, he sought the answer amid the ruins of his self-conceit. If⁠—</p>
 			<p>The voice of the other man in the room, querulously intruding upon his thoughts, aroused him.</p>
 			<p>“I say, Trysdale, what the deuce is the matter with you? You look unhappy as if you yourself had been married instead of having acted merely as an accomplice. Look at me, another accessory, come two thousand miles on a garlicky, cockroachy banana steamer all the way from South America to connive at the sacrifice⁠—please to observe how lightly my guilt rests upon my shoulders. Only little sister I had, too, and now she’s gone. Come now! take something to ease your conscience.”</p>
 			<p>“I don’t drink just now, thanks,” said Trysdale.</p>

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@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
 			<p>“As usual,” said Knight, smilingly. “I have put in the morning at the police station and at the inquest. It seems that a card case of mine containing cards with my name and address was found near the body. They have three witnesses who saw the shooting and gave a description of me. The case has been placed in the hands of Shamrock Jolnes, the famous detective. He left Headquarters at 11:30 on the assignment. I waited at my address until two, thinking he might call there.”</p>
 			<p>I laughed, tauntingly.</p>
 			<p>“You will never see Jolnes,” I continued, “until this murder has been forgotten, two or three weeks from now. I had a better opinion of your shrewdness, Knight. During the three hours and a half that you waited he has got out of your ken. He is after you on true induction theories now, and no wrongdoer has yet been known to come upon him while thus engaged. I advise you to give it up.”</p>
-			<p>“Doctor,” said Knight, with a sudden glint in his keen gray eye and a squaring of his chin, “in spite of the record your city holds of something like a dozen homicides without a subsequent meeting of the perpetrator, and the sleuth in charge of the case, I will undertake to break that record. To-morrow I will take you to Shamrock Jolnes⁠—I will unmask him before you and prove to you that it is not an impossibility for an officer of the law and a manslayer to stand face to face in your city.”</p>
+			<p>“Doctor,” said Knight, with a sudden glint in his keen gray eye and a squaring of his chin, “in spite of the record your city holds of something like a dozen homicides without a subsequent meeting of the perpetrator, and the sleuth in charge of the case, I will undertake to break that record. Tomorrow I will take you to Shamrock Jolnes⁠—I will unmask him before you and prove to you that it is not an impossibility for an officer of the law and a manslayer to stand face to face in your city.”</p>
 			<p>“Do it,” said I, “and you’ll have the sincere thanks of the Police Department.”</p>
 			<p>On the next day Knight called for me in a cab.</p>
 			<p>“I’ve been on one or two false scents, doctor,” he admitted. “I know something of detectives’ methods, and I followed out a few of them, expecting to find Jolnes at the other end. The pistol being a .45-caliber, I thought surely I would find him at work on the clue in Forty-fifth Street. Then, again, I looked for the detective at the Columbia University, as the man’s being shot in the back naturally suggested hazing. But I could not find a trace of him.”</p>

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@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
 			<h2 epub:type="title">The Dog and the Playlet</h2>
 			<p class="intro">[This story has been rewritten and published in “Strictly Business” under the title, The Proof of the Pudding.]</p>
 			<p>Usually it is a cold day in July when you can stroll up Broadway in that month and get a story out of the drama. I found one a few breathless, parboiling days ago, and it seems to decide a serious question in art.</p>
-			<p>There was not a soul left in the city except Hollis and me⁠—and two or three million sunworshippers who remained at desks and counters. The elect had fled to seashore, lake, and mountain, and had already begun to draw for additional funds. Every evening Hollis and I prowled about the deserted town searching for coolness in empty cafes, dining-rooms, and roofgardens. We knew to the tenth part of a revolution the speed of every electric fan in Gotham, and we followed the swiftest as they varied. Hollis’s fiancee. Miss Loris Sherman, had been in the Adirondacks, at Lower Saranac Lake, for a month. In another week he would join her party there. In the meantime, he cursed the city cheerfully and optimistically, and sought my society because I suffered him to show me her photograph during the black coffee every time we dined together.</p>
+			<p>There was not a soul left in the city except Hollis and me⁠—and two or three million sunworshippers who remained at desks and counters. The elect had fled to seashore, lake, and mountain, and had already begun to draw for additional funds. Every evening Hollis and I prowled about the deserted town searching for coolness in empty cafés, dining-rooms, and roofgardens. We knew to the tenth part of a revolution the speed of every electric fan in Gotham, and we followed the swiftest as they varied. Hollis’s fiancée. Miss Loris Sherman, had been in the Adirondacks, at Lower Saranac Lake, for a month. In another week he would join her party there. In the meantime, he cursed the city cheerfully and optimistically, and sought my society because I suffered him to show me her photograph during the black coffee every time we dined together.</p>
 			<p>My revenge was to read to him my one-act play.</p>
 			<p>It was one insufferable evening when the overplus of the day’s heat was being hurled quiveringly back to the heavens by every surcharged brick and stone and inch of iron in the panting town. But with the cunning of the two-legged beasts we had found an oasis where the hoofs of Apollo’s steed had not been allowed to strike. Our seats were on an ocean of cool, polished oak; the white linen of fifty deserted tables flapped like seagulls in the artificial breeze; a mile away a waiter lingered for a heliographic signal⁠—we might have roared songs there or fought a duel without molestation.</p>
 			<p>Out came Miss Loris’s photo with the coffee, and I once more praised the elegant poise of the neck, the extremely low-coiled mass of heavy hair, and the eyes that followed one, like those in an oil painting.</p>
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
 			<p>“I’ll admit,” said I, earnestly (for my theory was being touched upon), “that on all ordinary occasions all of us use commonplace language to convey our thoughts. You will remember that up to the moment when the captain makes his terrible discovery all the characters on the stage talk pretty much as they would, in real life. But I believe that I am right in allowing him lines suitable to the strong and tragic situation into which he falls.”</p>
 			<p>“Tragic, my eye!” said my friend, irreverently. “In Shakespeare’s day he might have sputtered out some high-cockalorum nonsense of that sort, because in those days they ordered ham and eggs in blank verse and discharged the cook with an epic. But not for B’way in the summer of 1905!”</p>
 			<p>“It is my opinion,” said I, “that great human emotions shake up our vocabulary and leave the words best suited to express them on top. A sudden violent grief or loss or disappointment will bring expressions out of an ordinary man as strong and solemn and dramatic as those used in fiction or on the stage to portray those emotions.”</p>
-			<p>“That’s where you fellows are wrong,” said Hollis. “Plain, every-day talk is what goes. Your captain would very likely have kicked the cat, lit a cigar, stirred up a highball, and telephoned for a lawyer, instead of getting off those Robert Mantell pyrotechnics.”</p>
+			<p>“That’s where you fellows are wrong,” said Hollis. “Plain, everyday talk is what goes. Your captain would very likely have kicked the cat, lit a cigar, stirred up a highball, and telephoned for a lawyer, instead of getting off those Robert Mantell pyrotechnics.”</p>
 			<p>“Possibly, a little later,” I continued. “But just at the time⁠—just as the blow is delivered, if something Scriptural or theatrical and deep-tongued isn’t wrung from a man in spite of his modern and practical way of speaking, then I’m wrong.”</p>
 			<p>“Of course,” said Hollis, kindly, “you’ve got to whoop her up some degrees for the stage. The audience expects it. When the villain kidnaps little Effie you have to make her mother claw some chunks out of the atmosphere, and scream: “Me chee-ild, me chee-ild!” What she would actually do would be to call up the police by ‘phone, ring for some strong tea, and get the little darling’s photo out, ready for the reporters. When you get your villain in a corner⁠—a stage corner⁠—it’s all right for him to clap his hand to his forehead and hiss: “All is lost!” Off the stage he would remark: “This is a conspiracy against me⁠—I refer you to my lawyers.’ ”</p>
 			<p>“I get no consolation,” said I, gloomily, “from your concession of an accentuated stage treatment. In my play I fondly hoped that I was following life. If people in real life meet great crises in a commonplace way, they should do the same on the stage.”</p>

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@@ -8,9 +8,9 @@
 	<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
 		<section id="the-red-roses-of-tonia" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
 			<h2 epub:type="title">The Red Roses of Tonia</h2>
-			<p>A trestle burned down on the International Railroad. The south-bound from San Antonio was cut off for the next forty-eight hours. On that train was Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat.</p>
+			<p>A trestle burned down on the International Railroad. The southbound from San Antonio was cut off for the next forty-eight hours. On that train was Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat.</p>
 			<p>Espirition, the Mexican, who had been sent forty miles in a buckboard from the Espinosa Ranch to fetch it, returned with a shrugging shoulder and hands empty except for a cigarette. At the small station, Nopal, he had learned of the delayed train and, having no commands to wait, turned his ponies toward the ranch again.</p>
-			<p>Now, if one supposes that Easter, the Goddess of Spring, cares any more for the after-church parade on Fifth Avenue than she does for her loyal outfit of subjects that assemble at the meeting-house at Cactus, Tex., a mistake has been made. The wives and daughters of the ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene at the Espinosa and pick up Tonia. With their Easter hats and frocks carefully wrapped and bundled against the dust, the fair aggregation would then merrily jog the ten miles to Cactus, where on the morrow they would array themselves, subjugate man, do homage to Easter, and cause jealous agitation among the lilies of the field.</p>
+			<p>Now, if one supposes that Easter, the Goddess of Spring, cares any more for the after-church parade on Fifth Avenue than she does for her loyal outfit of subjects that assemble at the meetinghouse at Cactus, Tex., a mistake has been made. The wives and daughters of the ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver’s Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene at the Espinosa and pick up Tonia. With their Easter hats and frocks carefully wrapped and bundled against the dust, the fair aggregation would then merrily jog the ten miles to Cactus, where on the morrow they would array themselves, subjugate man, do homage to Easter, and cause jealous agitation among the lilies of the field.</p>
 			<p>Tonia sat on the steps of the Espinosa ranch house flicking gloomily with a quirt at a tuft of curly mesquite. She displayed a frown and a contumelious lip, and endeavored to radiate an aura of disagreeableness and tragedy.</p>
 			<p>“I hate railroads,” she announced positively. “And men. Men pretend to run them. Can you give any excuse why a trestle should burn? Ida Bennet’s hat is to be trimmed with violets. I shall not go one step toward Cactus without a new hat. If I were a man I would get one.”</p>
 			<p>Two men listened uneasily to this disparagement of their kind. One was Wells Pearson, foreman of the Mucho Calor cattle ranch. The other was Thompson Burrows, the prosperous sheepman from the Quintana Valley. Both thought Tonia Weaver adorable, especially when she railed at railroads and menaced men. Either would have given up his epidermis to make for her an Easter hat more cheerfully than the ostrich gives up his tip or the aigrette lays down its life. Neither possessed the ingenuity to conceive a means of supplying the sad deficiency against the coming Sabbath. Pearson’s deep brown face and sunburned light hair gave him the appearance of a schoolboy seized by one of youth’s profound and insolvable melancholies. Tonia’s plight grieved him through and through. Thompson Burrows was the more skilled and pliable. He hailed from somewhere in the East originally; and he wore neckties and shoes, and was made dumb by woman’s presence.</p>
@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@
 			<p>Tonia paused. A sudden sparkle of hope had come into her eye. Her frown smoothed away. She had an inspiration.</p>
 			<p>“There’s a store over at Lone Elm Crossing on the Nueces,” she said, “that keeps hats. Eva Rogers got hers there. She said it was the latest style. It might have some left. But it’s twenty-eight miles to Lone Elm.”</p>
 			<p>The spurs of two men who hastily arose jingled; and Tonia almost smiled. The Knights, then, were not all turned to dust; nor were their rowels rust.</p>
-			<p>“Of course,” said Tonia, looking thoughtfully at a white gulf cloud sailing across the cerulean dome, “nobody could ride to Lone Elm and back by the time the girls call by for me to-morrow. So, I reckon I’ll have to stay at home this Easter Sunday.”</p>
+			<p>“Of course,” said Tonia, looking thoughtfully at a white gulf cloud sailing across the cerulean dome, “nobody could ride to Lone Elm and back by the time the girls call by for me tomorrow. So, I reckon I’ll have to stay at home this Easter Sunday.”</p>
 			<p>And then she smiled.</p>
 			<p>“Well, Miss Tonia,” said Pearson, reaching for his hat, as guileful as a sleeping babe. “I reckon I’ll be trotting along back to Mucho Calor. There’s some cutting out to be done on Dry Branch first thing in the morning; and me and Road Runner has got to be on hand. It’s too bad your hat got sidetracked. Maybe they’ll get that trestle mended yet in time for Easter.”</p>
 			<p>“I must be riding, too, Miss Tonia,” announced Burrows, looking at his watch. “I declare, it’s nearly five o’clock! I must be out at my lambing camp in time to help pen those crazy ewes.”</p>
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
 			<p>As his stirrups rattled against the brush Burrows’s long-legged sorrel struck out down the narrow stretch of open prairie to the southwest.</p>
 			<p>Tonia hung up her quirt and went into the sitting-room.</p>
 			<p>“I’m mighty sorry, daughter, that you didn’t get your hat,” said her mother.</p>
-			<p>“Oh, don’t worry, mother,” said Tonia, coolly. “I’ll have a new hat, all right, in time to-morrow.”</p>
+			<p>“Oh, don’t worry, mother,” said Tonia, coolly. “I’ll have a new hat, all right, in time tomorrow.”</p>
 			<hr/>
 			<p>When Burrows reached the end of the strip of prairie he pulled his sorrel to the right and let him pick his way daintily across a sacuista flat through which ran the ragged, dry bed of an arroyo. Then up a gravelly hill, matted with bush, the hoarse scrambled, and at length emerged, with a snort of satisfaction into a stretch of high, level prairie, grassy and dotted with the lighter green of mesquites in their fresh spring foliage. Always to the right Burrows bore, until in a little while he struck the old Indian trail that followed the Nueces southward, and that passed, twenty-eight miles to the southeast, through Lone Elm.</p>
 			<p>Here Burrows urged the sorrel into a steady lope. As he settled himself in the saddle for a long ride he heard the drumming of hoofs, the hollow “thwack” of chaparral against wooden stirrups, the whoop of a Comanche; and Wells Pearson burst out of the brush at the right of the trail like a precocious yellow chick from a dark green Easter egg.</p>
@@ -46,8 +46,8 @@
 			<p>“Twenty-eight miles,” said Burrows, looking a little grim. Pearson’s laugh woke an owl one hour too early in his water-elm on the river bank, half a mile away.</p>
 			<p>“All right for you, sheepman. I like an open game, myself. We’re two locoed he-milliners hat-hunting in the wilderness. I notify you. Burr, to mind your corrals. We’ve got an even start, and the one that gets the headgear will stand some higher at the Espinosa.”</p>
 			<p>“You’ve got a good pony,” said Burrows, eyeing Road Runner’s barrel-like body and tapering legs that moved as regularly as the pistonrod of an engine. “It’s a race, of course; but you’re too much of a horseman to whoop it up this soon. Say we travel together till we get to the home stretch.”</p>
-			<p>“I’m your company,” agreed Pearson, “and I admire your sense. If there’s hats at Lone Elm, one of ’em shall set on Miss Tonia’s brow to-morrow, and you won’t be at the crowning. I ain’t bragging, Burr, but that sorrel of yours is weak in the fore-legs.”</p>
-			<p>“My horse against yours,” offered Burrows, “that Miss Tonia wears the hat I take her to Cactus to-morrow.”</p>
+			<p>“I’m your company,” agreed Pearson, “and I admire your sense. If there’s hats at Lone Elm, one of ’em shall set on Miss Tonia’s brow tomorrow, and you won’t be at the crowning. I ain’t bragging, Burr, but that sorrel of yours is weak in the forelegs.”</p>
+			<p>“My horse against yours,” offered Burrows, “that Miss Tonia wears the hat I take her to Cactus tomorrow.”</p>
 			<p>“I’ll take you up,” shouted Pearson. “But oh, it’s just like horse-stealing for me! I can use that sorrel for a lady’s animal when⁠—when somebody comes over to Mucho Calor, and⁠—”</p>
 			<p>Burrows’ dark face glowered so suddenly that the cowman broke off his sentence. But Pearson could never feel any pressure for long.</p>
 			<p>“What’s all this Easter business about, Burr?” he asked, cheerfully. “Why do the women folks have to have new hats by the almanac or bust all cinches trying to get ’em?”</p>
@@ -63,15 +63,15 @@
 			<p>“Wells Pearson, of the Mucho Calor, and Burrows, of Green Valley,” was the response. “We want to buy some goods in the store. Sorry to wake you up but we must have ’em. Come on out, Uncle Tommy, and get a move on you.”</p>
 			<p>Uncle Tommy was slow, but at length they got him behind his counter with a kerosene lamp lit, and told him of their dire need.</p>
 			<p>“Easter hats?” said Uncle Tommy, sleepily. “Why, yes, I believe I have got just a couple left. I only ordered a dozen this spring. I’ll show ’em to you.”</p>
-			<p>Now, Uncle Tommy Sutton was a merchant, half asleep or awake. In dusty pasteboard boxes under the counter he had two left-over spring hats. But, alas! for his commercial probity on that early Saturday morn⁠—they were hats of two springs ago, and a woman’s eye would have detected the fraud at half a glance. But to the unintelligent gaze of the cowpuncher and the sheepman they seemed fresh from the mint of contemporaneous April.</p>
-			<p>The hats were of a variety once known as “cart-wheels.” They were of stiff straw, colored red, and flat brimmed. Both were exactly alike, and trimmed lavishly around their crowns with full blown, immaculate, artificial white roses.</p>
+			<p>Now, Uncle Tommy Sutton was a merchant, half asleep or awake. In dusty pasteboard boxes under the counter he had two leftover spring hats. But, alas! for his commercial probity on that early Saturday morn⁠—they were hats of two springs ago, and a woman’s eye would have detected the fraud at half a glance. But to the unintelligent gaze of the cowpuncher and the sheepman they seemed fresh from the mint of contemporaneous April.</p>
+			<p>The hats were of a variety once known as “cartwheels.” They were of stiff straw, colored red, and flat brimmed. Both were exactly alike, and trimmed lavishly around their crowns with full blown, immaculate, artificial white roses.</p>
 			<p>“That all you got, Uncle Tommy?” said Pearson. “All right. Not much choice here, Burr. Take your pick.”</p>
 			<p>“They’re the latest styles” lied Uncle Tommy. “You’d see ’em on Fifth Avenue, if you was in New York.”</p>
 			<p>Uncle Tommy wrapped and tied each hat in two yards of dark calico for a protection. One Pearson tied carefully to his calfskin saddle-thongs; and the other became part of Road Runner’s burden. They shouted thanks and farewells to Uncle Tommy, and cantered back into the night on the home stretch.</p>
 			<p>The horsemen jockeyed with all their skill. They rode more slowly on their way back. The few words they spoke were not unfriendly. Burrows had a Winchester under his left leg slung over his saddle horn. Pearson had a six shooter belted around him. Thus men rode in the Frio country.</p>
 			<p>At half-past seven in the morning they rode to the top of a hill and saw the Espinosa Ranch, a white spot under a dark patch of live-oaks, five miles away.</p>
 			<p>The sight roused Pearson from his drooping pose in the saddle. He knew what Road Runner could do. The sorrel was lathered, and stumbling frequently; Road Runner was pegging away like a donkey engine.</p>
-			<p>Pearson turned toward the sheepman and laughed. “Good-bye, Burr,” he cried, with a wave of his hand. “It’s a race now. We’re on the home stretch.”</p>
+			<p>Pearson turned toward the sheepman and laughed. “Goodbye, Burr,” he cried, with a wave of his hand. “It’s a race now. We’re on the home stretch.”</p>
 			<p>He pressed Road Runner with his knees and leaned toward the Espinosa. Road Runner struck into a gallop, with tossing head and snorting nostrils, as if he were fresh from a month in pasture.</p>
 			<p>Pearson rode twenty yards and heard the unmistakable sound of a Winchester lever throwing a cartridge into the barrel. He dropped flat along his horse’s back before the crack of the rifle reached his ears.</p>
 			<p>It is possible that Burrows intended only to disable the horse⁠—he was a good enough shot to do that without endangering his rider. But as Pearson stooped the ball went through his shoulder and then through Road Runner’s neck. The horse fell and the cowman pitched over his head into the hard road, and neither of them tried to move.</p>
@@ -79,9 +79,9 @@
 			<p>In two hours Pearson opened his eyes and took inventory. He managed to get to his feet and staggered back to where Road Runner was lying.</p>
 			<p>Road Runner was lying there, but he appeared to be comfortable. Pearson examined him and found that the bullet had “creased” him. He had been knocked out temporarily, but not seriously hurt. But he was tired, and he lay there on Miss Tonia’s hat and ate leaves from a mesquite branch that obligingly hung over the road.</p>
 			<p>Pearson made the horse get up. The Easter hat, loosed from the saddle-thongs, lay there in its calico wrappings, a shapeless thing from its sojourn beneath the solid carcass of Road Runner. Then Pearson fainted and fell head long upon the poor hat again, crumpling it under his wounded shoulders.</p>
-			<p>It is hard to kill a cowpuncher. In half an hour he revived⁠—long enough for a woman to have fainted twice and tried ice-cream for a restorer. He got up carefully and found Road Runner who was busy with the near-by grass. He tied the unfortunate hat to the saddle again, and managed to get himself there, too, after many failures.</p>
+			<p>It is hard to kill a cowpuncher. In half an hour he revived⁠—long enough for a woman to have fainted twice and tried ice-cream for a restorer. He got up carefully and found Road Runner who was busy with the nearby grass. He tied the unfortunate hat to the saddle again, and managed to get himself there, too, after many failures.</p>
 			<p>At noon a gay and fluttering company waited in front of the Espinosa Ranch. The Rogers girls were there in their new buckboard, and the Anchor-O outfit and the Green Valley folks⁠—mostly women. And each and every one wore her new Easter hat, even upon the lonely prairies, for they greatly desired to shine forth and do honor to the coming festival.</p>
-			<p>At the gate stood Tonia, with undisguised tears upon her cheeks. In her hand she held Burrow’s Lone Elm hat, and it was at its white roses, hated by her, that she wept. For her friends were telling her, with the ecstatic joy of true friends, that cart-wheels could not be worn, being three seasons passed into oblivion.</p>
+			<p>At the gate stood Tonia, with undisguised tears upon her cheeks. In her hand she held Burrow’s Lone Elm hat, and it was at its white roses, hated by her, that she wept. For her friends were telling her, with the ecstatic joy of true friends, that cartwheels could not be worn, being three seasons passed into oblivion.</p>
 			<p>“Put on your old hat and come, Tonia,” they urged.</p>
 			<p>“For Easter Sunday?” she answered. “I’ll die first.” And wept again.</p>
 			<p>The hats of the fortunate ones were curved and twisted into the style of spring’s latest proclamation.</p>
@@ -94,7 +94,7 @@
 			<p>She flew in to the glass, and out again, beaming, radiating, blossomed.</p>
 			<p>“Oh, don’t red become her?” chanted the girls in recitative. “Hurry up, Tonia!”</p>
 			<p>Tonia stopped for a moment by the side of Road Runner.</p>
-			<p>“Thank you, thank you, Wells,” she said, happily. “It’s just what I wanted. Won’t you come over to Cactus to-morrow and go to church with me?”</p>
+			<p>“Thank you, thank you, Wells,” she said, happily. “It’s just what I wanted. Won’t you come over to Cactus tomorrow and go to church with me?”</p>
 			<p>“If I can,” said Pearson. He was looking curiously at her hat, and then he grinned weakly.</p>
 			<p>Tonia flew into the buckboard like a bird. The vehicles sped away for Cactus.</p>
 			<p>“What have you been doing, Pearson?” asked Daddy Weaver. “You ain’t looking so well as common.”</p>

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@@ -8,28 +8,28 @@
 	<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
 		<section id="the-rubber-plants-story" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
 			<h2 epub:type="title">The Rubber Plant’s Story</h2>
-			<p>We rubber plants form the connecting link between the vegetable kingdom and the decorations of a Waldorf-Astoria scene in a Third Avenue theatre. I haven’t looked up our family tree, but I believe we were raised by grafting a gum overshoe on to a 30-cent table d’hote stalk of asparagus. You take a white bulldog with a Bourke Cockran air of independence about him and a rubber plant and there you have the fauna and flora of a flat. What the shamrock is to Ireland the rubber plant is to the dweller in flats and furnished rooms. We get moved from one place to another so quickly that the only way we can get our picture taken is with a kinetoscope. We are the vagrant vine and the flitting fig tree. You know the proverb: “Where the rubber plant sits in the window the moving van draws up to the door.”</p>
-			<p>We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle. No other vegetable except the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much handling as we can. When the family to which we belong moves into a flat they set us in the front window and we become lares and penates, fly-paper and the peripatetic emblem of “Home Sweet Home.” We aren’t as green as we look. I guess we are about what you would call the soubrettes of the conservatory. You try sitting in the front window of a $40 flat in Manhattan and looking out into the street all day, and back into the flat at night, and see whether you get wise or not⁠—hey? Talk about the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden⁠—say! suppose there had been a rubber plant there when Eve⁠—but I was going to tell you a story.</p>
+			<p>We rubber plants form the connecting link between the vegetable kingdom and the decorations of a Waldorf-Astoria scene in a Third Avenue theatre. I haven’t looked up our family tree, but I believe we were raised by grafting a gum overshoe on to a 30-cent table d’hôte stalk of asparagus. You take a white bulldog with a Bourke Cockran air of independence about him and a rubber plant and there you have the fauna and flora of a flat. What the shamrock is to Ireland the rubber plant is to the dweller in flats and furnished rooms. We get moved from one place to another so quickly that the only way we can get our picture taken is with a kinetoscope. We are the vagrant vine and the flitting fig tree. You know the proverb: “Where the rubber plant sits in the window the moving van draws up to the door.”</p>
+			<p>We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle. No other vegetable except the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much handling as we can. When the family to which we belong moves into a flat they set us in the front window and we become lares and penates, flypaper and the peripatetic emblem of “Home Sweet Home.” We aren’t as green as we look. I guess we are about what you would call the soubrettes of the conservatory. You try sitting in the front window of a $40 flat in Manhattan and looking out into the street all day, and back into the flat at night, and see whether you get wise or not⁠—hey? Talk about the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden⁠—say! suppose there had been a rubber plant there when Eve⁠—but I was going to tell you a story.</p>
 			<p>The first thing I can remember I had only three leaves and belonged to a member of the pony ballet. I was kept in a sunny window, and was generally watered with seltzer and lemon. I had plenty of fun in those days. I got cross-eyed trying to watch the numbers of the automobiles in the street and the dates on the labels inside at the same time.</p>
 			<p>Well, then the angel that was molting for the musical comedy lost his last feather and the company broke up. The ponies trotted away and I was left in the window ownerless. The janitor gave me to a refined comedy team on the eighth floor, and in six weeks I had been set in the window of five different flats I took on experience and put out two more leaves.</p>
 			<p>Miss Carruthers, of the refined comedy team⁠—did you ever see her cross both feet back of her neck?⁠—gave me to a friend of hers who had made an unfortunate marriage with a man in a store. Consequently I was placed in the window of a furnished room, rent in advance, water two flights up, gas extra after ten o’clock at night. Two of my leaves withered off here. Also, I was moved from one room to another so many times that I got to liking the odor of the pipes the expressmen smoked.</p>
 			<p>I don’t think I ever had so dull a time as I did with this lady. There was never anything amusing going on inside⁠—she was devoted to her husband, and, besides leaning out the window and flirting with the iceman, she never did a thing toward breaking the monotony.</p>
-			<p>When the couple broke up they left me with the rest of their goods at a second-hand store. I was put out in front for sale along with the jobbiest lot you ever heard of being lumped into one bargain. Think of this little cornucopia of wonders, all for $1.89: Henry James’s works, six talking machine records, one pair of tennis shoes, two bottles of horse radish, and a rubber plant⁠—that was me!</p>
+			<p>When the couple broke up they left me with the rest of their goods at a secondhand store. I was put out in front for sale along with the jobbiest lot you ever heard of being lumped into one bargain. Think of this little cornucopia of wonders, all for $1.89: Henry James’s works, six talking machine records, one pair of tennis shoes, two bottles of horse radish, and a rubber plant⁠—that was me!</p>
 			<p>One afternoon a girl came along and stopped to look at me. She had dark hair and eyes, and she looked slim, and sad around the mouth.</p>
 			<p>“Oh, oh!” she says to herself. “I never thought to see one up here.”</p>
 			<p>She pulls out a little purse about as thick as one of my leaves and fingers over some small silver in it. Old Koen, always on the lockout, is ready, rubbing his hands. This girl proceeds to turn down <abbr>Mr.</abbr> James and the other commodities. Rubber plants or nothing is the burden of her song. And at last Koen and she come together at 39 cents, and away she goes with me in her arms.</p>
 			<p>She was a nice girl, but not my style. Too quiet and sober looking. Thinks I to myself: “I’ll just about land on the fire-escape of a tenement, six stories up. And I’ll spend the next six months looking at clothes on the line.”</p>
 			<p>But she carried me to a nice little room only three flights up in quite a decent street. And she put me in the window, of course. And then she went to work and cooked dinner for herself. And what do you suppose she had? Bread and tea and a little dab of jam! Nothing else. Not a single lobster, nor so much as one bottle of champagne. The Carruthers comedy team had both every evening, except now and then when they took a notion for pig’s knuckle and kraut.</p>
-			<p>After she had finished her dinner my new owner came to the window and leaned down close to my leaves and cried softly to herself for a while. It made me feel funny. I never knew anybody to cry that way over a rubber plant before. Of course, I’ve seen a few of ’em turn on the tears for what they could get out of it, but she seemed to be crying just for the pure enjoyment of it. She touched my leaves like she loved ’em, and she bent down her head and kissed each one of ’em. I guess I’m about the toughest specimen of a peripatetic orchid on earth, but I tell you it made me feel sort of queer. Home never was like that to me before. Generally I used to get chewed by poodles and have shirt-waists hung on me to dry, and get watered with coffee grounds and peroxide of hydrogen.</p>
+			<p>After she had finished her dinner my new owner came to the window and leaned down close to my leaves and cried softly to herself for a while. It made me feel funny. I never knew anybody to cry that way over a rubber plant before. Of course, I’ve seen a few of ’em turn on the tears for what they could get out of it, but she seemed to be crying just for the pure enjoyment of it. She touched my leaves like she loved ’em, and she bent down her head and kissed each one of ’em. I guess I’m about the toughest specimen of a peripatetic orchid on earth, but I tell you it made me feel sort of queer. Home never was like that to me before. Generally I used to get chewed by poodles and have shirtwaists hung on me to dry, and get watered with coffee grounds and peroxide of hydrogen.</p>
 			<p>This girl had a piano in the room, and she used to disturb it with both hands while she made noises with her mouth for hours at a time. I suppose she was practising vocal music.</p>
 			<p>One day she seemed very much excited and kept looking at the clock. At eleven somebody knocked and she let in a stout, dark man with towsled black hair. He sat down at once at the piano and played while she sang for him. When she finished she laid one hand on her bosom and looked at him. He shook his head, and she leaned against the piano. “Two years already,” she said, speaking slowly⁠—“do you think in two more⁠—or even longer?”</p>
 			<p>The man shook his head again. “You waste your time,” he said, roughly I thought. “The voice is not there.” And then he looked at her in a peculiar way. “But the voice is not everything,” he went on. “You have looks. I can place you, as I told you if⁠—”</p>
-			<p>The girl pointed to the door without saying anything, and the dark man left the room. And then she came over and cried around me again. It’s a good thing I had enough rubber in me to be water-proof.</p>
-			<p>About that time somebody else knocked at the door. “Thank goodness,” I said to myself. “Here’s a chance to get the water-works turned off. I hope it’s somebody that’s game enough to stand a bird and a bottle to liven things up a little.” Tell you the truth, this little girl made me tired. A rubber plant likes to see a little sport now and then. I don’t suppose there’s another green thing in New York that sees as much of gay life unless it’s the chartreuse or the sprigs of parsley around the dish.</p>
+			<p>The girl pointed to the door without saying anything, and the dark man left the room. And then she came over and cried around me again. It’s a good thing I had enough rubber in me to be waterproof.</p>
+			<p>About that time somebody else knocked at the door. “Thank goodness,” I said to myself. “Here’s a chance to get the waterworks turned off. I hope it’s somebody that’s game enough to stand a bird and a bottle to liven things up a little.” Tell you the truth, this little girl made me tired. A rubber plant likes to see a little sport now and then. I don’t suppose there’s another green thing in New York that sees as much of gay life unless it’s the chartreuse or the sprigs of parsley around the dish.</p>
 			<p>When the girl opens the door in steps a young chap in a traveling cap and picks her up in his arms, and she sings out “Oh, Dick!” and stays there long enough to⁠—well, you’ve been a rubber plant too, sometimes, I suppose.</p>
 			<p>“Good thing!” says I to myself. “This is livelier than scales and weeping. Now there’ll be something doing.”</p>
 			<p>“You’ve got to go back with me,” says the young man. “I’ve come two thousand miles for you. Aren’t you tired of it yet. Bess? You’ve kept all of us waiting so long. Haven’t you found out yet what is best?”</p>
-			<p>“The bubble burst only to-day,” says the girl. “Come here, Dick, and see what I found the other day on the sidewalk for sale.” She brings him by the hand and exhibits yours truly. “How one ever got away up here who can tell? I bought it with almost the last money I had.”</p>
+			<p>“The bubble burst only today,” says the girl. “Come here, Dick, and see what I found the other day on the sidewalk for sale.” She brings him by the hand and exhibits yours truly. “How one ever got away up here who can tell? I bought it with almost the last money I had.”</p>
 			<p>He looked at me, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off her for more than a second. “Do you remember the night, Bess,” he said, “when we stood under one of those on the bank of the bayou and what you told me then?”</p>
 			<p>“Geewillikins!” I said to myself. “Both of them stand under a rubber plant! Seems to me they are stretching matters somewhat!”</p>
 			<p>“Do I not,” says she, looking up at him and sneaking close to his vest, “and now I say it again, and it is to last forever. Look, Dick, at its leaves, how wet they are. Those are my tears, and it was thinking of you that made them fall.”</p>

src/epub/text/the-snow-man.xhtml

@@ -9,16 +9,16 @@
 		<section id="the-snow-man" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
 			<h2 epub:type="title">The Snow Man</h2>
 			<p>Housed and windowpaned from it, the greatest wonder to little children is the snow. To men, it is something like a crucible in which their world melts into a white star ten million miles away. The man who can stand the test is a Snow Man; and this is his reading by Fahrenheit, Reaumur, or Moses’s carven tablets of stone.</p>
-			<p>Night had fluttered a sable pinion above the canyon of Big Lost River, and I urged my horse toward the Bay Horse Ranch because the snow was deepening. The flakes were as large as an hour’s circular tatting by Miss Wilkins’s ablest spinster, betokening a heavy snowfall and less entertainment and more adventure than the completion of the tatting could promise. I knew Ross Curtis of the Bay Horse, and that I would be welcome as a snow-bound pilgrim, both for hospitality’s sake and because Ross had few chances to confide in living creatures who did not neigh, bellow, bleat, yelp, or howl during his discourse.</p>
+			<p>Night had fluttered a sable pinion above the canyon of Big Lost River, and I urged my horse toward the Bay Horse Ranch because the snow was deepening. The flakes were as large as an hour’s circular tatting by Miss Wilkins’s ablest spinster, betokening a heavy snowfall and less entertainment and more adventure than the completion of the tatting could promise. I knew Ross Curtis of the Bay Horse, and that I would be welcome as a snowbound pilgrim, both for hospitality’s sake and because Ross had few chances to confide in living creatures who did not neigh, bellow, bleat, yelp, or howl during his discourse.</p>
 			<p>The ranch house was just within the jaws of the canyon where its builder may have fatuously fancied that the timbered and rocky walls on both sides would have protected it from the wintry Colorado winds; but I feared the drift. Even now through the endless, bottomless rift in the hills⁠—the speaking tube of the four winds⁠—came roaring the voice of the proprietor to the little room on the top floor.</p>
 			<p>At my “hello,” a ranch hand came from an outer building and received my thankful horse. In another minute, Ross and I sat by a stove in the dining-room of the four-room ranch house, while the big, simple welcome of the household lay at my disposal. Fanned by the whizzing norther, the fine, dry snow was sifted and bolted through the cracks and knotholes of the logs. The cook room, without a separating door, appended.</p>
 			<p>In there I could see a short, sturdy, leisurely and weather-beaten man moving with professional sureness about his red-hot stove. His face was stolid and unreadable⁠—something like that of a great thinker, or of one who had no thoughts to conceal. I thought his eye seemed unwarrantably superior to the elements and to the man, but quickly attributed that to the characteristic self-importance of a petty chef. “Camp cook” was the niche that I gave him in the Hall of Types; and he fitted it as an apple fits a dumpling.</p>
-			<p>Cold it was in spite of the glowing stove; and Ross and I sat and talked, shuddering frequently, half from nerves and half from the freezing draughts. So he brought the bottle and the cook brought boiling water, and we made prodigious hot toddies against the attacks of Boreas. We clinked glasses often. They sounded like icicles dropping from the eaves, or like the tinkle of a thousand prisms on a Louis <span epub:type="z3998:roman">XIV</span> chandelier that I once heard at a boarder’s dance in the parlor of a ten-a-week boarding-house in Gramercy Square. Sic transit.</p>
-			<p>Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow and of the Sphinx and of the stars; but they who believe that all things, from a without-wine table d’hote to the crucifixion, may be interpreted through music, might have found a nocturne or a symphony to express the isolation of that blotted-out world. The clink of glass and bottle, the aeolian chorus of the wind in the house crannies, its deeper trombone through the canyon below, and the Wagnerian crash of the cook’s pots and pans, united in a fit, discordant melody, I thought. No less welcome an accompaniment was the sizzling of broiling ham and venison cutlet indorsed by the solvent fumes of true Java, bringing rich promises of comfort to our yearning souls.</p>
-			<p>The cook brought the smoking supper to the table. He nodded to me democratically as he cast the heavy plates around as though he were pitching quoits or hurling the discus. I looked at him with some appraisement and curiosity and much conciliation. There was no prophet to tell us when that drifting evil outside might cease to fall; and it is well, when snow-bound, to stand somewhere within the radius of the cook’s favorable consideration. But I could read neither favor nor disapproval in the face and manner of our pot-wrestler.</p>
+			<p>Cold it was in spite of the glowing stove; and Ross and I sat and talked, shuddering frequently, half from nerves and half from the freezing draughts. So he brought the bottle and the cook brought boiling water, and we made prodigious hot toddies against the attacks of Boreas. We clinked glasses often. They sounded like icicles dropping from the eaves, or like the tinkle of a thousand prisms on a Louis <span epub:type="z3998:roman">XIV</span> chandelier that I once heard at a boarder’s dance in the parlor of a ten-a-week boardinghouse in Gramercy Square. Sic transit.</p>
+			<p>Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow and of the Sphinx and of the stars; but they who believe that all things, from a without-wine table d’hôte to the crucifixion, may be interpreted through music, might have found a nocturne or a symphony to express the isolation of that blotted-out world. The clink of glass and bottle, the aeolian chorus of the wind in the house crannies, its deeper trombone through the canyon below, and the Wagnerian crash of the cook’s pots and pans, united in a fit, discordant melody, I thought. No less welcome an accompaniment was the sizzling of broiling ham and venison cutlet endorsed by the solvent fumes of true Java, bringing rich promises of comfort to our yearning souls.</p>
+			<p>The cook brought the smoking supper to the table. He nodded to me democratically as he cast the heavy plates around as though he were pitching quoits or hurling the discus. I looked at him with some appraisement and curiosity and much conciliation. There was no prophet to tell us when that drifting evil outside might cease to fall; and it is well, when snowbound, to stand somewhere within the radius of the cook’s favorable consideration. But I could read neither favor nor disapproval in the face and manner of our pot-wrestler.</p>
 			<p>He was about five feet nine inches, and two hundred pounds of commonplace, bull-necked, pink-faced, callous calm. He wore brown duck trousers too tight and too short, and a blue flannel shirt with sleeves rolled above his elbows. There was a sort of grim, steady scowl on his features that looked to me as though he had fixed it there purposely as a protection against the weakness of an inherent amiability that, he fancied, were better concealed. And then I let supper usurp his brief occupancy of my thoughts.</p>
 			<p>“Draw up, George,” said Ross. “Let’s all eat while the grub’s hot.”</p>
-			<p>“You fellows go on and chew,” answered the cook. “I ate mine in the kitchen before sun-down.”</p>
+			<p>“You fellows go on and chew,” answered the cook. “I ate mine in the kitchen before sundown.”</p>
 			<p>“Think it’ll be a big snow, George?” asked the ranchman.</p>
 			<p>George had turned to reenter the cook room. He moved slowly around and, looking at his face, it seemed to me that he was turning over the wisdom and knowledge of centuries in his head.</p>
 			<p>“It might,” was his delayed reply.</p>
@@ -30,12 +30,12 @@
 			<p>And then the ranchman threw tobacco on the cleared table and set forth again the bottles and glasses; and I saw that I stood in a deep channel through which the long dammed flood of his discourse would soon be booming. But I was half content, comparing my fate with that of the late Thomas Tucker, who had to sing for his supper, thus doubling the burdens of both himself and his host.</p>
 			<p>“Snow is a hell of a thing,” said Ross, by way of a foreword. “It ain’t, somehow, it seems to me, salubrious. I can stand water and mud and two inches below zero and a hundred and ten in the shade and medium-sized cyclones, but this here fuzzy white stuff naturally gets me all locoed. I reckon the reason it rattles you is because it changes the look of things so much. It’s like you had a wife and left her in the morning with the same old blue cotton wrapper on, and rides in of a night and runs across her all outfitted in a white silk evening frock, waving an ostrich-feather fan, and monkeying with a posy of lily flowers. Wouldn’t it make you look for your pocket compass? You’d be liable to kiss her before you collected your presence of mind.”</p>
 			<p>By and by, the flood of Ross’s talk was drawn up into the clouds (so it pleased me to fancy) and there condensed into the finer snowflakes of thought; and we sat silent about the stove, as good friends and bitter enemies will do. I thought of Boss’s preamble about the mysterious influence upon man exerted by that ermine-lined monster that now covered our little world, and knew he was right.</p>
-			<p>Of all the curious knickknacks, mysteries, puzzles, Indian gifts, rat-traps, and well-disguised blessings that the gods chuck down to us from the Olympian peaks, the most disquieting and evil-bringing is the snow. By scientific analysis it is absolute beauty and purity⁠—so, at the beginning we look doubtfully at chemistry.</p>
-			<p>It falls upon the world, and lo! we live in another. It hides in a night the old scars and familiar places with which we have grown heart-sick or enamored. So, as quietly as we can, we hustle on our embroidered robes and hie us on Prince Camaralzaman’s horse or in the reindeer sleigh into the white country where the seven colors converge. This is when our fancy can overcome the bane of it.</p>
+			<p>Of all the curious knickknacks, mysteries, puzzles, Indian gifts, rattraps, and well-disguised blessings that the gods chuck down to us from the Olympian peaks, the most disquieting and evil-bringing is the snow. By scientific analysis it is absolute beauty and purity⁠—so, at the beginning we look doubtfully at chemistry.</p>
+			<p>It falls upon the world, and lo! we live in another. It hides in a night the old scars and familiar places with which we have grown heartsick or enamored. So, as quietly as we can, we hustle on our embroidered robes and hie us on Prince Camaralzaman’s horse or in the reindeer sleigh into the white country where the seven colors converge. This is when our fancy can overcome the bane of it.</p>
 			<p>But in certain spots of the earth comes the snow-madness, made known by people turned wild and distracted by the bewildering veil that has obscured the only world they know. In the cities, the white fairy who sets the brains of her dupes whirling by a wave of her wand is cast for the comedy role. Her diamond shoe buckles glitter like frost; with a pirouette she invites the spotless carnival.</p>
 			<p>But in the waste places the snow is sardonic. Sponging out the world of the outliers, it gives no foothold on another sphere in return. It makes of the earth a firmament under foot; it leaves us clawing and stumbling in space in an inimical fifth element whose evil outdoes its strangeness and beauty, There Nature, low comedienne, plays her tricks on man. Though she has put him forth as her highest product, it appears that she has fashioned him with what seems almost incredible carelessness and indexterity. One-sided and without balance, with his two halves unequally fashioned and joined, must he ever jog his eccentric way. The snow falls, the darkness caps it, and the ridiculous man-biped strays in accurate circles until he succumbs in the ruins of his defective architecture.</p>
 			<p>In the throat of the thirsty the snow is vitriol. In appearance as plausible as the breakfast food of the angels, it is as hot in the mouth as ginger, increasing the pangs of the water-famished. It is a derivative from water, air, and some cold, uncanny fire from which the caloric has been extracted. Good has been said of it; even the poets, crazed by its spell and shivering in their attics under its touch, have indited permanent melodies commemorative of its beauty.</p>
-			<p>Still, to the saddest overcoated optimist it is a plague⁠—a corroding plague that Pharaoh successfully side-stepped. It beneficently covers the wheat fields, swelling the crop⁠—and the Flour Trust gets us by the throat like a sudden quinsy. It spreads the tail of its white kirtle over the red seams of the rugged north⁠—and the Alaskan short story is born. Etiolated perfidy, it shelters the mountain traveler burrowing from the icy air⁠—and, melting to-morrow, drowns his brother in the valley below.</p>
+			<p>Still, to the saddest overcoated optimist it is a plague⁠—a corroding plague that Pharaoh successfully sidestepped. It beneficently covers the wheat fields, swelling the crop⁠—and the Flour Trust gets us by the throat like a sudden quinsy. It spreads the tail of its white kirtle over the red seams of the rugged north⁠—and the Alaskan short story is born. Etiolated perfidy, it shelters the mountain traveler burrowing from the icy air⁠—and, melting tomorrow, drowns his brother in the valley below.</p>
 			<p>At its worst it is lock and key and crucible, and the wand of Circe. When it corrals man in lonely ranches, mountain cabins, and forest huts, the snow makes apes and tigers of the hardiest. It turns the bosoms of weaker ones to glass, their tongues to infants’ rattles, their hearts to lawlessness and spleen. It is not all from the isolation; the snow is not merely a blockader; it is a Chemical Test. It is a good man who can show a reaction that is not chiefly composed of a drachm or two of potash and magnesia, with traces of Adam, Ananias, Nebuchadnezzar, and the fretful porcupine.</p>
 			<p>This is no story, you say; well, let it begin.</p>
 			<p>There was a knock at the door (is the opening not full of context and reminiscence oh, best buyers of best sellers?).</p>
@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
 			<p>Let a paragraphic biography of Girod intervene.</p>
 			<p>Etienne was an opera singer originally, we gathered; but adversity and the snow had made him <i xml:lang="la">non compos vocis</i>. The adversity consisted of the stranded San Salvador Opera Company, a period of hotel second-story work, and then a career as a professional palmist, jumping from town to town. For, like other professional palmists, every time he worked the Heart Line too strongly he immediately moved along the Line of Least Resistance. Though Etienne did not confide this to us, we surmised that he had moved out into the dusk about twenty minutes ahead of a constable, and had thus encountered the snow. In his most sacred blue language he dilated upon the subject of snow; for Etienne was Paris-born and loved the snow with the same passion that an orchid does.</p>
 			<p>“Mee-ser-rhable!” commented Etienne, and took another three fingers.</p>
-			<p>“Complete, cast-iron, pussy-footed, blank … blank!” said Ross, and followed suit.</p>
+			<p>“Complete, cast-iron, pussyfooted, blank … blank!” said Ross, and followed suit.</p>
 			<p>“Rotten,” said I.</p>
 			<p>The cook said nothing. He stood in the door weighing our outburst; and insistently from behind that frozen visage I got two messages (via the M. A. M wireless). One was that George considered our vituperation against the snow childish; the other was that George did not love Dagoes. Inasmuch as Etienne was a Frenchman, I concluded I had the message wrong. So I queried the other: “Bright eyes, you don’t really mean Dagoes, do you?” and over the wireless came three deathly, psychic taps: “Yes.” Then I reflected that to George all foreigners were probably “Dagoes.” I had once known another camp cook who had thought Mons., Sig., and Millie (Trans-Mississippi for <abbr>Mlle.</abbr>) were Italian given names; this cook used to marvel therefore at the paucity of Neo-Roman precognomens, and therefore why not⁠—</p>
 			<p>I have said that snow is a test of men. For one day, two days, Etienne stood at the window, Fletcherizing his finger nails and shrieking and moaning at the monotony. To me, Etienne was just about as unbearable as the snow; and so, seeking relief, I went out on the second day to look at my horse, slipped on a stone, broke my collarbone, and thereafter underwent not the snow test, but the test of flat-on-the-back. A test that comes once too often for any man to stand.</p>
@@ -63,15 +63,15 @@
 			<p>He stood up and fixed us with a solemn eye. None of us moved under that Orphic suspense until,</p>
 			<p>“A woman,” remarked George.</p>
 			<hr/>
-			<p>Miss Willie Adams was her name. Vocation, school-teacher. Present avocation, getting lost in the snow. Age, yum-yum (the Persian for twenty). Take to the woods if you would describe Miss Adams. A willow for grace; a hickory for fibre; a birch for the clear whiteness of her skin; for eyes, the blue sky seen through treetops; the silk in cocoons for her hair; her voice, the murmur of the evening June wind in the leaves; her mouth, the berries of the wintergreen; fingers as light as ferns; her toe as small as a deer track. General impression upon the dazed beholder⁠—you could not see the forest for the trees.</p>
+			<p>Miss Willie Adams was her name. Vocation, schoolteacher. Present avocation, getting lost in the snow. Age, yum-yum (the Persian for twenty). Take to the woods if you would describe Miss Adams. A willow for grace; a hickory for fibre; a birch for the clear whiteness of her skin; for eyes, the blue sky seen through treetops; the silk in cocoons for her hair; her voice, the murmur of the evening June wind in the leaves; her mouth, the berries of the wintergreen; fingers as light as ferns; her toe as small as a deer track. General impression upon the dazed beholder⁠—you could not see the forest for the trees.</p>
 			<p>Psychology, with a capital P and the foot of a lynx, at this juncture stalks into the ranch house. Three men, a cook, a pretty young woman⁠—all snowbound. Count me out of it, as I did not count, anyway. I never did, with women. Count the cook out, if you like. But note the effect upon Ross and Etienne Girod.</p>
 			<p>Ross dumped Mark Twain in a trunk and locked the trunk. Also, he discarded the Pittsburg scandals. Also, he shaved off a three days’ beard.</p>
 			<p>Etienne, being French, began on the beard first. He pomaded it, from a little tube of grease Hongroise in his vest pocket. He combed it with a little aluminum comb from the same vest pocket. He trimmed it with manicure scissors from the same vest pocket. His light and Gallic spirits underwent a sudden, miraculous change. He hummed a blithe San Salvador Opera Company tune; he grinned, smirked, bowed, pirouetted, twiddled, twaddled, twisted, and tooralooed. Gayly, the notorious troubadour, could not have equalled Etienne.</p>
 			<p>Ross’s method of advance was brusque, domineering. “Little woman,” he said, “you’re welcome here!”⁠—and with what he thought subtle double meaning⁠—“welcome to stay here as long as you like, snow or no snow.”</p>
 			<p>Miss Adams thanked him a little wildly, some of the wintergreen berries creeping into the birch bark. She looked around hurriedly as if seeking escape. But there was none, save the kitchen and the room allotted her. She made an excuse and disappeared into her own room.</p>
 			<p>Later I, feigning sleep, heard the following:</p>
-			<p>“Mees Adams, I was almost to perish-die-of monotony w’en your fair and beautiful face appear in thees mee-ser-rhable house.” I opened my starboard eye. The beard was being curled furiously around a finger, the Svengali eye was rolling, the chair was being hunched closer to the school-teacher’s. “I am French⁠—you see⁠—temperamental⁠—nervous! I cannot endure thees dull hours in thees ranch house; but⁠—a woman comes! Ah!” The shoulders gave nine ‘rahs and a tiger. “What a difference! All is light and gay; ever’ting smile w’en you smile. You have ‘eart, beauty, grace. My ‘eart comes back to me w’en I feel your ‘eart. So!” He laid his hand upon his vest pocket. From this vantage point he suddenly snatched at the school-teacher’s own hand, “Ah! Mees Adams, if I could only tell you how I ad⁠—”</p>
-			<p>“Dinner,” remarked George. He was standing just behind the Frenchman’s ear. His eyes looked straight into the school-teacher’s eyes. After thirty seconds of survey, his lips moved, deep in the flinty, frozen maelstrom of his face: “Dinner,” he concluded, “will be ready in two minutes.”</p>
+			<p>“Mees Adams, I was almost to perish-die-of monotony w’en your fair and beautiful face appear in thees mee-ser-rhable house.” I opened my starboard eye. The beard was being curled furiously around a finger, the Svengali eye was rolling, the chair was being hunched closer to the schoolteacher’s. “I am French⁠—you see⁠—temperamental⁠—nervous! I cannot endure thees dull hours in thees ranch house; but⁠—a woman comes! Ah!” The shoulders gave nine ‘rahs and a tiger. “What a difference! All is light and gay; ever’ting smile w’en you smile. You have ‘eart, beauty, grace. My ‘eart comes back to me w’en I feel your ‘eart. So!” He laid his hand upon his vest pocket. From this vantage point he suddenly snatched at the schoolteacher’s own hand, “Ah! Mees Adams, if I could only tell you how I ad⁠—”</p>
+			<p>“Dinner,” remarked George. He was standing just behind the Frenchman’s ear. His eyes looked straight into the schoolteacher’s eyes. After thirty seconds of survey, his lips moved, deep in the flinty, frozen maelstrom of his face: “Dinner,” he concluded, “will be ready in two minutes.”</p>
 			<p>Miss Adams jumped to her feet, relieved. “I must get ready for dinner,” she said brightly, and went into her room.</p>
 			<p>Ross came in fifteen minutes late. After the dishes had been cleaned away, I waited until a propitious time when the room was temporarily ours alone, and told him what had happened.</p>
 			<p>He became so excited that he lit a stogy without thinking. “Yeller-hided, unwashed, palm-readin’ skunk,” he said under his breath. “I’ll shoot him full o’ holes if he don’t watch out⁠—talkin’ that way to my wife!”</p>
@@ -79,7 +79,7 @@
 			<p>“Well, I mean to make her that,” he announced.</p>
 			<p>The air in the ranch house the rest of that day was tense with pent-up emotions, oh, best buyers of best sellers.</p>
 			<p>Ross watched Miss Adams as a hawk does a hen; he watched Etienne as a hawk does a scarecrow, Etienne watched Miss Adams as a weasel does a henhouse. He paid no attention to Ross.</p>
-			<p>The condition of Miss Adams, in the role of sought-after, was feverish. Lately escaped from the agony and long torture of the white cold, where for hours Nature had kept the little school-teacher’s vision locked in and turned upon herself, nobody knows through what profound feminine introspections she had gone. Now, suddenly cast among men, instead of finding relief and security, she beheld herself plunged anew into other discomforts. Even in her own room she could hear the loud voices of her imposed suitors. “I’ll blow you full o’ holes!” shouted Ross. “Witnesses,” shrieked Etienne, waving his hand at the cook and me. She could not have known the previous harassed condition of the men, fretting under indoor conditions. All she knew was, that where she had expected the frank freemasonry of the West, she found the subtle tangle of two men’s minds, bent upon exacting whatever romance there might be in her situation.</p>
+			<p>The condition of Miss Adams, in the role of sought-after, was feverish. Lately escaped from the agony and long torture of the white cold, where for hours Nature had kept the little schoolteacher’s vision locked in and turned upon herself, nobody knows through what profound feminine introspections she had gone. Now, suddenly cast among men, instead of finding relief and security, she beheld herself plunged anew into other discomforts. Even in her own room she could hear the loud voices of her imposed suitors. “I’ll blow you full o’ holes!” shouted Ross. “Witnesses,” shrieked Etienne, waving his hand at the cook and me. She could not have known the previous harassed condition of the men, fretting under indoor conditions. All she knew was, that where she had expected the frank freemasonry of the West, she found the subtle tangle of two men’s minds, bent upon exacting whatever romance there might be in her situation.</p>
 			<p>She tried to dodge Ross and the Frenchman by spells of nursing me. They also came over to help nurse. This combination aroused such a natural state of invalid cussedness on my part that they were all forced to retire. Once she did manage to whisper: “I am so worried here. I don’t know what to do.”</p>
 			<p>To which I replied, gently, hitching up my shoulder, that I was a hunch-savant and that the Eighth House under this sign, the Moon being in Virgo, showed that everything would turn out all right.</p>
 			<p>But twenty minutes later I saw Etienne reading her palm and felt that perhaps I might have to recast her horoscope, and try for a dark man coming with a bundle.</p>
@@ -100,12 +100,12 @@
 			<p>Ross banged the table. “Shut up, you miserable yeller pup!” he roared. “I object to your pursuin’ anything or anybody in my house. Now, you listen to me, you⁠—” He picked up the box of stogies and used it on the table as an emphasizer. The noise of it awoke the attention of the girl in the kitchen. Unheeded, she crept into the room. “I don’t know anything about your French ways of lovemakin’ an’ I don’t care. In my section of the country, it’s the best man wins. And I’m the best man here, and don’t you forget it! This girl’s goin’ to be mine. There ain’t going to be any playing, or philandering, or palm reading about it. I’ve made up my mind I’ll have this girl, and that settles it. My word is the law in this neck o’ the woods. She’s mine, and as soon as she says she’s mine, you pull out.” The box made one final, tremendous punctuation point.</p>
 			<p>Etienne’s bravado was unruffled. “Ah! that is no way to win a woman,” he smiled, easily. “I make prophecy you will never win ‘er that way. No. Not thees woman. She mus’ be played along an’ then keessed, this charming, delicious little creature. One kees! An’ then you ’ave her.” Again he displayed his unpleasant teeth. “I make you a bet I will kees her⁠—”</p>
 			<p>As a cheerful chronicler of deeds done well, it joys me to relate that the hand which fell upon Etienne’s amorous lips was not his own. There was one sudden sound, as of a mule kicking a lath fence, and then⁠—through the swinging doors of oblivion for Etienne.</p>
-			<p>I had seen this blow delivered. It was an aloof, unstudied, almost absent-minded affair. I had thought the cook was rehearsing the proper method of turning a flapjack.</p>
+			<p>I had seen this blow delivered. It was an aloof, unstudied, almost absentminded affair. I had thought the cook was rehearsing the proper method of turning a flapjack.</p>
 			<p>Silently, lost in thought, he stood there scratching his head. Then he began rolling down his sleeves.</p>
 			<p>“You’d better get your things on, Miss, and we’ll get out of here,” he decided. “Wrap up warm.”</p>
 			<p>I heard her heave a little sigh of relief as she went to get her cloak, sweater, and hat.</p>
 			<p>Ross jumped to his feet, and said: “George, what are you goin’ to do?”</p>
-			<p>George, who had been headed in my direction, slowly swivelled around and faced his employer. “Bein’ a camp cook, I ain’t over-burdened with hosses,” George enlightened us. “Therefore, I am going to try to borrow this feller’s here.”</p>
+			<p>George, who had been headed in my direction, slowly swivelled around and faced his employer. “Bein’ a camp cook, I ain’t overburdened with hosses,” George enlightened us. “Therefore, I am going to try to borrow this feller’s here.”</p>
 			<p>For the first time in four days my soul gave a genuine cheer. “If it’s for Lochinvar purposes, go as far as you like,” I said, grandly.</p>
 			<p>The cook studied me a moment, as if trying to find an insult in my words. “No,” he replied. “It’s for mine and the young lady’s purposes, and we’ll go only three miles⁠—to Hicksville. Now let me tell you somethin’, Ross.” Suddenly I was confronted with the cook’s chunky back and I heard a low, curt, carrying voice shoot through the room at my host. George had wheeled just as Ross started to speak. “You’re nutty. That’s what’s the matter with you. You can’t stand the snow. You’re getting nervouser, and nuttier every day. That and this Dago”⁠—he jerked a thumb at the half-dead Frenchman in the corner⁠—“has got you to the point where I thought I better horn in. I got to revolving it around in my mind and I seen if somethin’ wasn’t done, and done soon, there’d be murder around here and maybe”⁠—his head gave an imperceptible list toward the girl’s room⁠—“worse.”</p>
 			<p>He stopped, but he held up a stubby finger to keep any one else from speaking. Then he plowed slowly through the drift of his ideas. “About this here woman. I know you, Ross, and I know what you reely think about women. If she hadn’t happened in here durin’ this here snow, you’d never have given two thoughts to the whole woman question. Likewise, when the storm clears, and you and the boys go hustlin’ out, this here whole business ‘ll clear out of your head and you won’t think of a skirt again until Kingdom Come. Just because o’ this snow here, don’t forget you’re living in the selfsame world you was in four days ago. And you’re the same man, too. Now, what’s the use o’ getting all snarled up over four days of stickin’ in the house? That there’s what I been revolvin’ in my mind and this here’s the decision I’ve come to.”</p>