k that if you know Mariposa and understand even the rudiments
of banking, you are perfectly acquainted with Mr. Pupkin. What? You
remember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high school teacher?
In love with HER? What a ridiculous idea. You mean merely because on the
night when the Mariposa Belle sank with every soul on board, Pupkin put
off from the town in a skiff to rescue Miss Lawson. Oh, but you're quite
wrong. That wasn't LOVE. I've heard Pupkin explain it himself a dozen
times. That sort of thing,--paddling out to a sinking steamer at night
in a crazy skiff,--may indicate a sort of attraction, but not real love,
not what Pupkin came to feel afterwards. Indeed, when he began to think
of it, it wasn't even attraction, it was merely respect,--that's all
it was. And anyway, that was long before, six or seven months back, and
Pupkin admitted that at the time he was a mere boy.

Mr. Pupkin, I must explain, lived with Mallory Tompkins in rooms over
the Exchange Bank, on the very top floor, the third, with Mullins's own
rooms below them. Extremely comfortable quarters they were, with two
bedrooms and a sitting-room that was all fixed up with snowshoes and
tennis rackets on the walls and dance programmes and canoe club badges
and all that sort of thing.

Mallory Tompkins was a young man with long legs and check trousers who
worked on the Mariposa Times-Herald. That was what gave him his literary
taste. He used to read Ibsen and that other Dutch author--Bumstone
Bumstone, isn't it?--and you can judge that he was a mighty intellectual
fellow. He was so intellectual that he was, as he himself admitted,
a complete eggnostic. He and Pupkin used to have the most tremendous
arguments about creation and evolution, and how if you study at a school
of applied science you learn that there's no hell beyond the present
life.

Mallory Tompkins used to prove absolutely that the miracles were only
electricity, and Pupkin used to admit that it was an awfully good
argument, but claimed that he had heard it awfully well answered in a
sermon, though unfortunately he had forgotten how.

Tompkins used to show that the flood was contrary to geology, and Pupkin
would acknowledge that the point was an excellent one, but that he had
read a book,--the title of which he ought to have written down,--which
explained geology away altogether.

Mallory Tompkins generally got the best of the merely logical side of
the arguments, but Pupkin-