when he
sees her across the liver and bacon at breakfast, he forgets that he's
never told her before that she could look like anything but an angel,
and asks, "Gee, Mame, what makes your nose so red?" And that's the
place where a young couple begins to adjust itself to life as it's
lived on Michigan Avenue instead of in the story-books.

There's no rule for getting through the next six months without going
back to mamma, except for the Brute to be as kind as he knows how to
be and the Angel as forgiving as she can be. But at the end of that
time a boy and girl with the right kind of stuff in them have been
graduated into a man and a woman. It's only calf love that's always
bellering about it. When love is full grown it has few words, and
sometimes it growls them out.

I remember, when I was a youngster, hearing old Mrs. Hoover tell of
the trip she took with the Doc just after they were married. Even as a
young fellow the Doc was a great exhorter. Knew more Scripture when he
was sixteen than the presiding elder. Couldn't open his mouth without
losing a verse. Would lose a chapter when he yawned.

Well, when Doc was about twenty-five, he fell in love with a mighty
sweet young girl, Leila Hardin, who every one said was too frivolous
for him. But the Doc only answered that it was his duty to marry her
to bring her under Christian influences, and they set off down the
river to New Orleans on their honeymoon.

Mrs. Hoover used to say that he hardly spoke to her on the trip. Sat
around in a daze, scowling and rolling his eyes, or charged up and
down the deck, swinging his arms and muttering to himself. Scared her
half to death, and she spent all her time crying when he wasn't
around. Thought he didn't love her any more, and it wasn't till the
first Sunday after she got home that she discovered what had ailed
him. Seemed that in the exaltation produced by his happiness at having
got her, he'd been composing a masterpiece, his famous sermon on the
Horrors of Hell, that scared half of Pike County into the fold, and
popularized dominoes with penny points as a substitute for
dollar-limit draw-poker among those whom it didn't quite fetch.

Curious old cuss, the Doc. Found his wife played the piano pretty
medium rotten, so when he wanted to work himself into a rage about
something he'd sit down in the parlor and make her pound out "The
Maiden's Prayer."

It's a mighty lucky thing that the Lord, and not the neighbors, makes
t