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Page 88
A POOR RULE
I have always maintained, and asserted ime to time, that woman is no
mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and
interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon
credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As
"Harper's Drawer" used to say in bygone years: "The following good
story is told of Miss --, Mr. --, Mr. --and Mr. --."
We shall have to omit "Bishop X" and "the Rev. --," for they do not
belong.
In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern
Pacific. A reporter would have called it a "mushroom" town; but it
was not. Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.
The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the
passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine
hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences.
The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, "black-waxy" mud, and
mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an about-to-
be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-
day train by which you might leave, creditably sustained the role of
charity.
The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while
it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and
perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of
Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and
sorghum.
There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which
the family lived. From the kitchen extended a "shelter" made of poles
covered with chaparral brush. Under this was a table and two benches,
each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry. Here was
set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans, soda-
biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.
Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as "Betty," but denied
to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with
salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours a
Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided
him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian banquets, I
place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.
Ileen Hinkle!
The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she
had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography that
Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have indorsed the
phonography.
Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to
invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through
Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grand-
stand--or was it a temple?--under the shelter at the door of the
kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with a
little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the
barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died
in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you
put it under the arch, and she took it.
I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I
must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: A Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. It
is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive
conceptions of beauty--roundness and smoothness, I think they are,
according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as
for smoothness--the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother
she becomes.
Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure
Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam. She
was a fruit-stand blonde-strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her
eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm
that never comes. But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are
wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful. Like fancy, "It is
engendered in the eyes." There are three kinds of beauties--I was
foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.
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