Other Peoples Business | Page 9

one who has been
tendered irrefutable proof of a friend's unworthiness. Thomas gulped.
Well, it was only what he had expected all along. A woman like Persis
could not be asked to overlook everything.
"Good night, Persis," he said huskily, and he thought it more than his
deserts when she answered him with her usual kindness, "Good night,
Thomas."
CHAPTER III
A FITTING
During the spring and summer Persis rose at half past five, and though
she slept little the night following Thomas Hardin's disclosures, she
refused to concede to her feeling of weariness so much as an extra
half-hour. Her fitful slumbers had been haunted by dreams of apples,
apples in barrels, apples in baskets, apples dropping from full boughs
and pelting her like hail-stones, for all her dodging. There were
feverishly red apples, gnarly green apples and the golden sweets, the
favorites of her childhood, all of them turning into goblins as she
approached, and leering up at her out of impish eyes which
nevertheless bore a startling resemblance to those eyes in whose depths
she had once seen only the reflection of her own loyalty. It was small
wonder that Persis woke unrefreshed. "I declare," she mused, as she
twisted her hair into the unyielding knob, highly in favor among the
feminine residents of Clematis as a morning coiffure, "a few more
nights like that would set me against apple pie for good and all."
But the developments of the day were soon to elbow out of Persis'

thoughts the visions of the night. As she stepped out on the porch for a
whiff of the invigorating morning air, her eyes fell upon a unique figure
coming toward her across the dewy grass. In certain details it gave a
realistic presentment of an Indian famine sufferer. In respect to costume,
it was reminiscent of a bathing beach in mid-July.
"Of all things!" Persis gasped, one hand groping for support, while the
other shaded her incredulous and indignant eyes. "Have you taken
leave of your senses, Joel Dale?"
Her brother ascended the steps, wearing the expression of triumph
ordinarily assumed in honor of his great hygienic discoveries. He
replied to her question by another: "Persis, what do you s'pose is at the
bottom of all human ills?"
Persis rallied.
"I don't know as I'd undertake to speak for 'em all, but I should say that
a good nine-tenths was due to a lack of common sense."
Joel disdained to take up the gauntlet. "Persis, it's clothes."
His sister looked him over. Joel was attired in a pair of bathing trunks
and a bath towel, the latter festooned gracefully about his body, low
enough to show his projecting ribs. "If the style you're wearing at
present was ever to get what you'd call popular," she agreed dryly, "I
think it would make considerable trouble."
Joel again refused to be diverted. "Clothes, Persis, are an invention of
the devil. The electricity of the body, instead of passing off into the
earth as it would do if we went around the way the Lord intended, is
kept pent up in our insides by our clothes, and of course it gets to
playing the mischief with all our organs. As old Fuller says, 'He that is
proud of the rustling of his silks, like a madman laughs at the rattling of
his fetters.'"
"The sun is shining right on your bare back," remarked Persis acridly.
"According to your ideas yesterday, you'd ought to be ready to drop

dead."
Joel magnanimously ignored the taunt. Like some greater men, he had
discovered that to be true to to-day's vision, one must often violate
yesterday's conviction. The charge of inconsistency never troubled him.
"Earth and air are stuffed with helpfulness, Persis, and the clothes we
wear won't give it a chance at us. If the Lord had wanted us to be
covered, we'd have come into the world with a shell like a turtle. Now,
this rig ain't ideal because we've got to make some concessions to folks'
narrowness and prejudice, but it's a long way ahead of ordinary dress."
"Joel Dale!" The grim resolution of Persis' voice warned the dreamer of
the family that the limit of her forbearance had been reached. "I'm not
going to stand up for clothes, though seeing that my living, and yours
too, depends on 'em, it's not for me to run 'em down. But this I will say,
as long as we live in a civilized land, we've got to act civilized. And as
for having you show yourself on this lawn in a get-up that would set
every dog in Clematis to barking, I won't. Go up-stairs and dress like
somebody beside a Fiji islander, but first give your feet and legs a good
rubbing. If you don't, the