ictim: 32. Business status:
rubber broker. Prevalent tastes: To be able to sit up and
eat and drink and smoke and go to the office the way other
fellows do. Nature of illness: The meanest kind of
rheumatism. Kindly deliver said letters as early and often
as possible!

"Very truly yours, etc."

Sorrowfully then for a moment he studied the depleted balance in his
check-book. "Of course" he argued, not unguiltily, "Of course that
check was just the amount that I was planning to spend on a
turquoise-studded belt for Cornelia's birthday; but if Cornelia's
brains really need more adorning than does her body--if this special
investment, in fact, will mean more to both of us in the long run than
a dozen turquoise belts--."

Big and bland and blond and beautiful, Cornelia's physical personality
loomed up suddenly in his memory--so big, in fact, so bland, so blond,
so splendidly beautiful, that he realized abruptly with a strange
little tucked feeling in his heart that the question of Cornelia's
"brains" had never yet occurred to him. Pushing the thought
impatiently aside he sank back luxuriantly again into his pillows, and
grinned without any perceptible effort at all as he planned adroitly
how he would paste the Serial Love Letters one by one into the
gaudiest looking scrap-book that he could find and present it to
Cornelia on her birthday as a text-book for the "newly engaged" girl.
And he hoped and prayed with all his heart that every individual
letter would be printed with crimson ink on a violet-scented page and
would fairly reek from date to signature with all the joyous, ecstatic
silliness that graces either an old-fashioned novel or a modern
breach-of-promise suit.

So, quite worn out at last with all this unwonted excitement, he
drowsed off to sleep for as long as ten minutes and dreamed that he
was a--bigamist.

The next day and the next night were stale and mean and musty with a
drizzling winter rain. But the following morning crashed
inconsiderately into the world's limp face like a snowball spiked with
icicles. Gasping for breath and crunching for foothold the sidewalk
people breasted the gritty cold. Puckered with chills and goose-flesh,
the fireside people huddled and sneezed around their respective
hearths. Shivering like the ague between his cotton-flannel blankets,
Stanton's courage fairly raced the mercury in its downward course. By
noon his teeth were chattering like a mo