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.
Then I came. I do not think I was prettier. I certainly do not think I was as pretty as she was. But I was new, and she was old -- they all left her and followed me. They worshiped me. It was to my door they sent their flowers. It was now I they offered twenty horses when I could ride only one. It was for me they waited at street corners. And it was what I said and did that they talked of. Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life. No one ever had told me I was beautiful, but now they did. I believed them. I did not know it was simply a fashion, which one man had set and the rest followed without thought. I liked them to ask me to marry them, and to say, No. I hated them. I was still young. I did not know all men were my children, as the older woman knows when she learns about the world.
