so you see they
weren't merely playing for the fun of the thing. Of course it's a
hollow pleasure. You realize that when you wake up at night parched with
thirst, ten thousand matches to the bad. But banking is a wild life and
everybody knows it.

Sometimes Pupkin would swear off and keep away from the cursed thing for
weeks, and then perhaps he'd see by sheer accident a pile of matches on
the table, or a match lying on the floor and it would start the craze in
him. I am using his own words--a "craze"--that's what he called it when
he told Miss Lawson all about it, and she promised to cure him of it.
She would have, too. Only, as I say, Pupkin found that what he had
mistaken for attraction was only respect. And there's no use worrying a
woman that you respect about your crazes.

It was from Mallory Tompkins that Pupkin learned all about the Mariposa
people, because Pupkin came from away off--somewhere down in the
Maritime Provinces--and didn't know a soul. Mallory Tompkins used to
tell him about Judge Pepperleigh, and what a wonderfully clever man he
was and how he would have been in the Supreme Court for certain if the
Conservative Government had stayed in another fifteen or twenty years
instead of coming to a premature end. He used to talk so much about the
Pepperleighs, that Pupkin was sick of the very name. But just as soon as
he had seen Zena Pepperleigh he couldn't hear enough of them. He would
have talked with Tompkins for hours about the judge's dog Rover. And as
for Zena, if he could have brought her name over his lips, he would have
talked of her forever.

He first saw her--by one of the strangest coincidences in the world--on
the Main Street of Mariposa. If he hadn't happened to be going up the
street and she to be coming down it, the thing wouldn't have happened.
Afterwards they both admitted that it was one of the most peculiar
coincidences they ever heard of. Pupkin owned that he had had the
strangest feeling that morning as if something were going to happen--a
feeling not at all to be classed with the one of which he had once
spoken to Miss Lawson, and which was, at the most, a mere anticipation
of respect.

But, as I say, Pupkin met Zena Pepperleigh on the 26th of June, at
twenty-five minutes to eleven. And at once the whole world changed. The
past was all blotted out. Even in the new forty volume edition of
the "Instalment Record of Humanity" that Mallory Tompkins had just
received--Pupkin wouldn