Object, Matrimony

The narrator Bud Preston recounts a comic episode at an ostentatious ranch house where he and fellow hand Ellis live under the thrifty, showy owner Shooting-star Wilson. With dances canceled and boredom setting in, the owner devours sentimental magazines and reads a personal advertisement seeking a loving, sensible wife, which prompts him to consider marriage as a remedy for loneliness and domestic shortcomings. The men trade barbs about cooking, botched cake experiments, and the practicality of courting as romantic notions bump against roughhouse bachelor routines. The story lightly satirizes the gap between printed idealism and everyday frontier domestic life.