said we wouldn't have anything to live on," Wallace pursued, not
looking at his wife, "and that she wanted to take a rest when she got
married, and have a little fun. Well, I says, we can keep it quiet for
awhile. Well, we talked about it that day, and after that we would kind
of josh about it, and finally one day we walked over to the bureau and
got out a license, and the Justice of the Peace----"

"Wallie--my God!" Martie breathed.

"Well, listen!" he urged her impatiently. "I put a wrong age on the
license and so did she, and she had told me a lot of lies about
herself, as I found out later, Martie----"

"So that it wasn't legal!"

"Well, listen. After that we went on with the crowd for a few weeks,
and we didn't tell anybody. And then this Dr. Prendergast turned up----"

"WHAT Dr. Prendergast!"

"I don't know who he was--a dentist anyway. And he had known Golda
before, somewhere, and he was crazy about her. His wife was getting a
divorce, it seems; anyway, he butted right in, and she let him. I don't
think she had awfully good sense, she would act sort of crazy
sometimes, as if she didn't know what she was doing. Well, I told her I
wouldn't stand for that, and we had some fights. But just then my dad
wrote and told me that he would finance me for a year at Stanford, and
I began to think I'd like to cut the whole bunch. So I said to Golda:
'I'm done. I'm going to get out! You keep your mouth shut, and I'll
keep mine!' She says, 'Leon'--that was Prendergast--'is going to marry
me, and you'll talk before I do!' So----"

"But, Wallace----"

"But what, dearie?"

"But it wasn't left that way?"

"Now, listen, dearie. Of course it wasn't! She and Prendergast were
going to leave town, a few days later, but I was kind of worried about
it, and I finally told my uncle the whole story. Of course he blew up!
He sent for her, and she came right in, scared to death. He told her
that he'd give away the whole story to Prendergast, or else he'd give
her a check for five hundred dollars on her wedding day. She fell for
it, and we said good-bye. She swore it was only a sort of joke anyway,
and that the day we--we did it, she'd been filling me up with whisky
lemonades and all that, and that the whole thing was off. And let me
tell you that I was glad to beat it! I never saw her again until this
morning! I went on the stage, and changed my name because the leading
lady in that show happened to be Thelma Tenney. About a month