When a Man Marries | Page 4

it the wildest prank of
Jimmy's career, although Jim himself seemed to take it awfully hard.
We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with Bella,
and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married Jim. My
first winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of 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 asked me to. He said he was not a photographer, and that anyhow

the rest of my features called for the nose he had given me, and that all
the Greuze women have long necks. I have not.
After I had refused Jim twice he met Bella at a camp in the
Adirondacks and when he came back he came at once to see me. He
seemed to think 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 matter what she may say about it, but Jim had been getting on my
nerves for some time, and I was much calmer than he expected me to
be.
"If you mean," I said finally in desperation, "that you and Bella are--are
in love, why don't you say so, Jim? I think you will find that I stand it
wonderfully."
He brightened perceptibly.
"I didn't know how you would take it, Kit," he said, "and I hope we will
always be bully friends. You are absolutely sure you don't care a
whoop for me?"
"Absolutely," I replied, and we shook hands on it. Then he began about
Bella; it was very tiresome.
Bella is a nice girl, but I had roomed with her at school, and I was
under no illusions. When Jim raved about Bella and her banjo, and
Bella and her guitar, I had painful moments when I recalled Bella,
learning 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-table again, and wished him happiness--which was sincere enough,
but hopeless--and said we had only been playing a game, but that it was
time to stop playing. Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very
touching.
We had been the best of friends ever since. Two days before the
wedding he came around from his tailor's, and we burned all his letters
to me. He 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, "I am not worthy of her, Kit. I wonder if I can make her
happy?" Or--"Did you know that the Duke of Belford proposed to her
in London last winter?"
Of course, one has to take the woman's word about a thing like that, but
the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard all that winter.
You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to be
reminiscently sentimental, a sort of
how-silly-we-were-but-it-is-all-over-now occasion, became actually a
two hours' eulogy of Bella. And just when I was bored to death, the
Mercer girls dropped in and heard Jim begin to read one commencing
"dearest Kit." And the next day after the rehearsal dinner, they told
Bella!
There was very nearly no wedding at all. Bella came to see me in a
frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd
pounds in my face, and although I explained it all over and over, she
never quite forgave me. That was what made it so hard later--the
situation would have been bad enough without that complication.
They went abroad on their wedding journey, and stayed several months.
And when Jim came back he was fatter than ever. Everybody noticed it.
Bella had a gymnasium fitted up in a corner of the studio, but he would
not 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 man who took her in, although it did not make him thin. Bella was
flirting, too, and by the time they had been married a year, people
hitched their chairs together and dropped their voices when they were
mentioned.
Well, on the anniversary of the day Bella left him--oh yes, she left him
finally. She was intense enough about some things, and she