Torchy and Vee | Page 2

and most of the young married crowd seemed to pass her up too.
I didn't know why. Guess I hadn't thought much about it. I knew she'd lost her father and mother within the last year or so, so I expect I put it down to that as the reason she wasn't mixin' much.
But Vee has all the inside dope. Seems old man Gray had been a chronic invalid for years. Heart trouble. And durin' all the last of it he'd been promisin' to check out constant, but had kept puttin' it off. Meanwhile Mrs. Gray and Marion had been fillin' in as day and night nurses. He'd been a peevish, grouchy old boy, too, and the more waitin' on he got the more he demanded. Little things. He had to have his food cooked just so, the chair cushions adjusted, the light just right. He had to be read to so many hours a day, and played to, and sung to. He couldn't stand it to be alone, not for half an hour. Didn't want to think, he said. Didn't want to see the women folks knittin' or crocheting: he wanted 'em to be attending to him all the while. He had a little silver bell that he kept hung on his chair arm, and when he rang it one or the other of 'em had to jump. Maybe you know the kind.
Course, the Grays traveled a lot; South in the winter, North in summer--always huntin' a place where he'd feel better, and never findin' it. If he was at the seashore he'd complain that they ought to be in the mountains, and when they got there it wouldn't be a week before he had decided the air was bad for him. They should have known better than to take him there. Most likely one more week would finish him. Another long railroad trip would anyway. So he might as well stay. But wouldn't Marion see the landlord and have those fiendish children kept quiet on that tennis court outside? And wouldn't Mother try to make an eggnog that didn't taste like a liquid pancake!
Havin' been humorin' his whims a good deal longer than Marion, and not being very strong herself, Mrs. Gray finally wore out. And almost before they knew anything serious was the matter she was gone. Then it all fell on Marion. Course, if she'd been a paid nurse she never would have stood for this continuous double-time act. Or if there was home inspectors, same as there are for factories, the old man would have been jacked up for violatin' the labor laws. But being only a daughter, there's nobody to step in and remind him that slavery has gone out of style and that in most states the female of the species was gettin' to be a reg'lar person. In fact, there was few who thought Marion was doin' any more'n she had a right to do. Wasn't he her father, and wasn't he payin' all the bills?
"To be sure," adds Vee, "he didn't realize what an old tyrant he was. Nor did Marion. She considered it her duty, and never complained."
"Then I don't see who could have crashed in," said I.
"No one could," said Vee. "That was the pity."
And it seems for the last couple of years the old boy insisted on settlin' down in his home here, where he could shuffle off comfortable. He'd been mighty slow about it, though, and when he finally headed West it was discovered that, through poor managin' and war conditions, the income they'd been livin' on had shrunk considerable. The fine old house was left free and clear, but there was hardly enough to keep it up unless Marion could rustle a job somewhere.
"And all she knows how to do is nurse," says Vee. "She's not even a trained nurse at that."
"Ain't there anybody she could marry?" I suggests.
"That's the tragic part, Torchy," says Vee. "There is--Mr. Biggies."
"What, 'Puffy' Biggles!" says I. "Not that old prune face with the shiny dome and the baggy eyes?"
Vee says he's the one. He's been hoverin' 'round, like an old buzzard, for three or four years now, playin' chess with the old man while he lasted, but always with his pop-eyes fixed on Marion. And since she's been left alone he'd been callin' reg'lar once a week, urging her to be his tootsy-wootsy No. 3. He was the main wheeze in some third-rate life insurance concern, I believe, and fairly well off, and he owned a classy place over near the Country Club. But he had a 44 belt, a chin like a pelican, and he was so short of breath that everybody called him "Puffy" Biggles. Besides, he was fifty.
"A hot old Romeo he'd make for a nice girl like