"You certainly--are--the prize--fool!" she said, when she
switched off the current, and she said it with vicious emphasis.
Whereupon she recovered the novel, seated herself determinedly in
the beribboned rocker, flipped the leaves of the book spitefully
until she found one which had a corner turned down, and read a
garden-party chapter much as she used to study her multiplication
table when she was ten and hated arithmetic.
A freight was announced over the wire, arrived with a great
wheezing and snorting, which finally settled to a rhythmic
gasping of the air pump, while a few boxes of store supplies were
being dumped unceremoniously upon the platform. Miss Georgie was
freight agent as well as many other things, and she went out and
stood bareheaded in the sun to watch the unloading.
She performed, with the unthinking precision which comes of long
practice, the many little duties pertaining to her several
offices, and when the wheels began once more to clank, and she
had waved her hand to the fireman, the brakeman, and the
conductor, and had seen the dirty flags at the rear of the
swaying caboose flap out of sight around the low, sage-covered
hill, she turned rather dismally to the parlor end of the office,
and took up the book with her former air of grim determination.
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