Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/224

212 I just tried to do my best to make her happy. There 's no good trying to please a woman. You 're all the same. Be kind to them, be loving, break your heart trying to give them pleasure—and that's the way it is."

"What 's the way it is?" asked Corinne, sitting up on her heels and feeling over her person for a pin to fasten the waistband of the skirt.

"The way it is now with me and Viola—coldness, indifference, maybe dislike." Then, half to himself: "There 's no understanding women. What were they made for, anyway?"

Corinne seemed to think this remark worthy of attention. Her search for the pin was arrested and she pondered for a moment. Then she looked at the colonel and said tentatively, not quite sure of the reasonableness of her reply:

"I suppose so that people can have mothers, colonel."

"So that people can have love, Corinne," he answered sadly.

Corinne, feeling that her solution of the problem had not been the right one, returned to the pin. She found it, and bending over the patient kitten, inserted it carefully into the band. But her calculations were not true, the pin pricked, and the cat, with an angry mew, broke away and went scuttling across the room inclosed in the skirt. Her appearance was so