When a Man Marries

romised all kinds of jollification, if they would come; and then when they did come and got in the papers and every one-but ourselves-laughed himself black in the face, they turned on ME! I, who suff

Japanese butler, and it enmeshed and mixed up generally ten respectable members of society and a polic

lexible and full of expression as a pillow in a tight cover. The angrier he got the funnier he looked, and when he was raging, and his neck swelled up over his collar and got red, he was entrancing. And everybody liked him,

. His art was a huge joke-except to himself. If he asked people to dinner, every one expected a frolic. When he married Bella Knowles, p

attention. He painted my portrait in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit it. It was a very nice picture, but it did not look like me, so I stayed away from the exhibition. Jim ask

hink I would be sorry to lose him, and he blundered over the telling for twenty minutes. Of course, no woman likes to lose a lover, no

ou and Bella are-are in love, why don't you say so, J

tened pe

, "and I hope we will always be bully friends. You

hook hands on it. Then he began a

ing her two songs on each instrument, and the old English ballad she had learned to play on the harp. When he said she was too good for him, I never batted an eye. And I shook hands solemnly across the tea-t

would read one and say: "Here's a crackerjack, Kit," and pass it to me. And after I had read it we would lay it on the firelog, and Jim would say,

ut a thing like that, but the Duke of Belford h

-is all-over-now occasion, became actually a two hours' eulogy of Bella. And just when I was bored to death, the Mercer girls dr

his two-hundred odd pounds in my face, and although I explained it all over and over, she never quite forga

ot use it. He smoked a pipe and painted all day, and drank beer and WOULD eat starches or whatever it is that is fattening. But he adored Bella, and he was madly jealous of her. At dinners he used to glare at the

got on her nerves to have everybody chuckle when they asked for her husband. They would say, "Hello, Bella! How's Bubbles? Still banting?"

Bella had taken her maiden name again and had had an operation for appendicitis. We heard afterward that they didn't find an appendix, and that the one they showed her in a glass jar WAS NOT HE

oking for a sideboard for father's birthday in March-and I met Jimmy there, boring into a worm-hole in a sev

me dig bait, and then let's go fishing. If there's a worm in every hole

But he ignored my gibe and swelle

. If you want to see your life passing away, if you want to see the steps by which you are marching to eternity, watch that clock mark

ough the rest of the day like this. I know what you'll do; you'll go home to

protested feeb

hose new draperies that Harry Bayles sent you from Shanghai, and you are going to order dinn

picked up his hat, and stood looking down at m

the finest girl I know, Kit, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, and you are goi

didn't marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my

he door and stop

n't sleep. Wouldn't you think I'd lose flesh? Kit"-he

where Bella was. He said he thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was going to marry Reggie Wol

as the victim, both of circumstances and of

knew one side of a range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she did-saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along