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Updated: June 11, 2025
Jacks," said Ileen. "If you only knew how I appreciate any one's being candid and not a flatterer! I get so tired of people telling me I'm pretty. I think it is the loveliest thing to have friends who tell you the truth." Then I thought I saw an expectant look on Ileen's face as she glanced toward me.
But as for real singin' I reckon you couldn't call it that." I looked closely at Ileen to see if Bud had overdone his frankness, but her pleased smile and sweetly spoken thanks assured me that we were on the right track. "And what do you think, Mr. Jacks?" she asked next. "Take it from me," said Jacks, "you ain't in the prima donna class.
Bud squirmed in his chair at his chance to show the sincerity that he knew was required of him. "Tell you the truth, Miss Ileen," he said, earnestly, "you ain't got much more voice than a weasel just a little squeak, you know. Of course, we all like to hear you sing, for it's kind of sweet and soothin' after all, and you look most as mighty well sittin' on the piano-stool as you do faced around.
On the fifth, Jacks and I, entering the brush arbor for our supper, saw the Mexican youth, instead of a divinity in a spotless waist and a navy-blue skirt, taking in the dollars through the barbed-wire wicket. We rushed into the kitchen, meeting Pa Hinkle coming out with two cups of hot coffee in his hands. "Where's Ileen?" we asked, in recitative. Pa Hinkle was a kindly man.
About dusk one evening I was sitting on the little gallery in front of the Hinkle parlor, waiting for Ileen to come, when I heard voices inside. She had come into the room with her father, and Old Man Hinkle began to talk to her. I had observed before that he was a shrewd man, and not unphilosophic.
Here Jacks and Bud and I or sometimes one or two of us, according to our good-luck used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was over, and "visit" Miss Hinkle. Ileen was a girl of ideas. She had read and listened and thought.
"In all ages, Miss Hinkle," said I, "in spite of the poetry and romance of each, intellect in woman has been admired more than beauty. Even in Cleopatra, herself, men found more charm in her queenly mind than in her looks." "Well, I should think so!" said Ileen. "I've seen pictures of her that weren't so much. She had an awfully long nose."
"I'm awfully weary," she said, one evening, when we three musketeers of the mesquite were in the little parlor, "of having compliments on my looks paid to me. I know I'm not beautiful." "I'm only a little Middle-Western girl," went on Ileen, "who just wants to be simple and neat, and tries to help her father make a humble living."
With a merry laugh at Jacks' criticism, Ileen looked inquiringly at me. I admit that I faltered a little. Was there not such a thing as being too frank? Perhaps I even hedged a little in my verdict; but I stayed with the critics. "I am not skilled in scientific music, Miss Ileen," I said, "but, frankly, I cannot praise very highly the singing-voice that Nature has given you.
Ileen Hinkle! The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. 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.
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