Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/328

318 "I did wonder if it was n't a little girl," he wrote, "because she spoke so honest about the red yarn and about the light-house, and most of the grown up women I know ain't quite so honest spoken. But the lady at the hospital who wrote for me first—Miss Larned—said she did n't think it was a little girl; and of course she could tell better than I could, being a woman herself."

Then Joe said that he should like to come to Provincetown, but his business never took him that way, and then he reiterated his invitation to them to come to see him.

"Since I made so bold as to ask you the first time, you 'll forgive my asking you over again. I do really wish you could see your way to come," he said. It 's very pretty here in the fall, our apples are just beginning to be ripe, and there ain't any such apples anywhere ever I 've been as in the Genesee Valley."

Then Joe added his "best respects" to Mrs. Bennet's daughter, and closed his letter.

If there had been in the circle of Joe's acquaintance now one even moderately attractive marriageable woman, Joe would have drifted into falling in love with her, as inevitably as an apple falls off its stem when its days of ripening are numbered; but there was not. Joe's own set of boys and girls were heads of households now, and for the next younger set, Joe was too old. Young girls did not please him, partly perhaps, because he saw, or