Her Weight in Gold | Page 6

world in
general, the other hating everybody in it, including the General. Before
they parted Eddie Ten Eyck extracted a solemn promise from his future
step-father-in-law that he would ascertain Martha's exact weight and
report the figure to him on the following day.
"It will seem easier if I know just about what to expect," explained the
young man.
That very afternoon the General, with a timidity that astonished him,
requested his stepdaughter to report her correct weight to him on the
following morning. He kept his face well screened behind his
newspaper while speaking, and his voice was a little thick.
"What for, father?" asked Martha, looking up from her book in surprise.
Her eyes seemed to grow even larger than the lenses of her spectacles.
"Why, you see--er--I'm figuring on a little more insurance," he
stammered.
"What has my weight to do with it?"
"It isn't life insurance," he made haste to explain. A bright idea struck
him. "It is fire insurance, my dear."
"I don't see what my--"
"Of course you don't," he interrupted genially. "It's this way. The fire
insurance companies are getting absurdly finicky about the risks. Now
they insist on knowing the weight of every inmate of the houses they
insure. Has something to do with the displacement of oxygen, I believe.
Your mother and I--and the servants, too--expect to be weighed
to-night."
"Oh," she said, and resumed her reading.
He waited for a while, fumbling nervously with his watch chain.
"By the way, my dear," he said, "what have you been doing to that

bully chap, Eddie Ten Eyck?"
"Doing to him? What do you mean?"
"Just what I say."
"I haven't seen the miserable loafer in months," she said. Her voice was
heavy, not unlike that of a man. For some reason she shuffled uneasily
in her chair. The book dropped into her capacious lap.
"You've been doing something behind my back, you sly minx," he
chided. "What do you think happened to-day?"
"To Eddie Ten Eyck?"
"In a way, yes. He came up to me in the Club and asked my permission
to pay--er--court to you, my dear. He said he loved you better than--
Hey! Look out there! What the dev--Hi, Mother! Come here quick!
Good Heaven, she's going to die!"
Poor Martha had collapsed in a heap, her arms dangling limply over the
side of the chair, her eyes bulging and blinking in a most grotesque
manner. At first glance one would have sworn she was strangling.
Afterwards the General denounced himself as an unmitigated idiot for
having given her such a shock. He ought to have known better.
Mrs. Gamble rushed downstairs in great alarm, and it was not long
before they had Martha breathing naturally, although the General
almost made that an impossibility by the ruthless manner in which he
fanned her with the very book she had been reading--a heavy volume
which he neglected to open.
The whirligig room reduced itself to a library for Martha once more,
not so monotonous as it once had been, no doubt, but still a library. Out
of the turmoil of her own emotions, she managed to grasp enough of
what the General was saying to convince herself that this was not
another dream but a reality, and she became so excited that her mother
advised her to go to bed for a while before dinner, if she expected to

appear at her best when Eddie arrived.
For the first time since early childhood, Martha blushed as she
attempted to trip lightly upstairs. As a matter of fact, she DID trip on
next to the top step and sprawled. Under ordinary circumstances she
would have been as mad as a wet hen, but on this happy occasion she
merely cried out, when her parents dashed into the hall below on
hearing the crash:
"It's good luck to fall upstairs!"
The fires of life had been rekindled, and when such a thing happens to a
person of Martha's horse-power, the effect is astonishing. At four o
'clock she began dressing for the coming suitor. When he arrived at
seven, she was still trying to decide whether her hair looked better by
itself or with augmentations.
Below, in the huge library, Eddie Ten Eyck sat disconsolate, nervously
contemplating the immediate future. He was all alone. Not even a
servant was to be seen or heard. It was as still as the Christmas Eve
whose jingle we love so well.
Never in all his aimless existence had he felt so small, so unimportant,
so put-upon as at this moment. His gaze, sweeping the ceiling of the
library, tried to penetrate to the sacred precincts above. Even the riches
and the stateliness of the Gamble mansion failed to reimburse his fancy
for the losses it was