er. The deserted Freshman was sound asleep when I got back--and
joined another sorority.

Thereafter, for a time, Carl went into University Extension, lecturing
on Trade-Unionism and South Africa. It did not please him altogether,
and finally my father, a lawyer himself, persuaded him to go into law.
Carl Parker in law! How we used to shudder at it afterwards; but it was
just one more broadening experience that he got out of life.

Then came the San Francisco earthquake. That was the end of my Junior
year, and we felt we had to be married when I finished college--nothing
else mattered quite as much as that. So when an offer came out of a
clear sky from Halsey and Company, for Carl to be a bond-salesman on a
salary that assured matrimony within a year, though in no affluence, and
the bottom all out of the law business and no enthusiasm for it anyway,
we held a consultation and decided for bonds and marriage. What a
bond-salesman Carl made! Those who knew him knew what has been referred
to as "the magic of his personality," and could understand how he was
having the whole of a small country town asking him to dinner on his
second visit.

I somehow got through my Senior year; but how the days dragged! For all
I could think of was Carl, Carl, Carl, and getting married. Yet no
one--no one on this earth--ever had the fun out of their engaged days
that we did, when we were together. Carl used to say that the
accumulated expenses of courting me for almost four years came to
$10.25. He just guessed at $10.25, though any cheap figure would have
done. We just did not care about doing things that happened to cost
money. We never did care in our lives, and never would have cared, no
matter what our income might be. Undoubtedly that was the main reason we
were so blissful on such a small salary in University work--we could
never think, at the time, of anything much we were doing without. I
remember that the happiest Christmas we almost ever had was over in the
country, when we spent under two dollars for all of us. We were
absolutely down to bed-rock that year anyway. (It was just after we paid
off our European debt.) Carl gave me a book, "The Pastor's Wife," and we
gloated over it together all Christmas afternoon! We gave each of the
boys a ten-cent cap-pistol and five cents' worth of caps--they were in
their Paradise. I mended three shirts of Carl's that had been in my
basket so long they were really like new to him,--he'd forgot