When a Man Marries | Page 3

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WHEN A MAN MARRIES
by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Contents
I At Least I Meant Well II The Way It Began III I Might Have Known It IV The Door Was Closed V From The Tree Of Love VI A Mighty Poor Joke VII We Make An Omelet VIII Correspondents' Department IX Flannigan's Find X On The Stairs XI I Make A Discovery XII The Roof Garden XIII He Does Not Deny It XIV Almost, But Not Quite XV Suspicion and Discord XVI I Face Flannigan XVII A Clash and A Kiss XVIII It's All My Fault XIX The Harbison Man XX Breaking Out In A New Place XXI A Bar of Soap XXII It Was A Delirium XXIII Coming

Needles and pins Needles and pins, When a man marries His trouble begins.
Chapter I.
AT LEAST I MEANT WELL
When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every one turned on me. The injustice of it hurt me most. They said I got up the dinner, that I asked them to give up other engagements and come, that I promised 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 suffered ten times to their one! I shall never forget what Dallas Brown said to me, standing with a coal shovel in one hand and a--well, perhaps it would be better to tell it all in the order it happened.
It began with Jimmy Wilson and a conspiracy, was helped on by a foot-square piece of yellow paper and a Japanese butler, and it enmeshed and mixed up generally ten respectable members of society and a policeman. Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar and a box of soap, which sounds incongruous, doesn't it?
It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim was rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the lines of his face, or what should have been lines, were really dimples, his face was about as flexible 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, and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his pictures (he has one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people buy them instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his Jap. The whole story hinges on the Jap.
The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His ambition in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily refused to. 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, people chuckled at the wedding, and considered 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