The hotel keeper may have had a daughter, and the farmer in the outskirts had two, but we never saw them. She reigned alone, like a queen. All the men worshiped her. She was the only woman they had to think of. They talked of her on the step, at the market, at the hotel; they watched for her at street corners; they hated the man she bowed to or walked with down the street. They brought flowers to the front door; they offered her their horses; they begged her to marry them when they dared. There was something noble and even heroic in this devotion of men to the best woman they knew. There was also something natural in it, that these men, shut off from the world, should give to one woman the worship that otherwise they would have given to twenty. And there was also something mean in their envy of one another. If she had raised her little finger, I suppose, she might have married any one of them.
