Klondike didn't
do it. He was one of the first up the Yukon in that mad rush. He
returned minus all the money and equipment with which he had started,
including the great toe of his right foot--tribute levied by the frozen
North. From boom town to boom town he went. The first stampede always
found him there, deep in blue-prints, engineering sheets, prospectuses.
But no sooner did the town install a water-works and the First National
Bank house itself in a Portland-cement Greek temple with Roman pillars
and a mosaic floor than he grew restless and was on the move.

A swashbuckler, Sam Pardee, in tan shoes and a brown derby. An 1890
Villon handicapped by a home-loving wife; an incurable romantic married
to a woman who judged as shiftless any housewife possessed of less than
two dozen bath towels, twelve tablecloths, eighteen wash cloths, and at
least three dozen dish towels, hand-hemmed. Milly Pardee's idea of
adventure was testing the recipes illustrated in the How To Use The
Cheaper Cuts page in the back of the woman's magazines.

Perversely enough, they had been drawn together by the very attraction
of dissimilarity. He had found her feminine home-loving qualities most
appealing. His manner of wearing an invisible cloak, sword and buckler,
though actually garbed in ready-mades, thrilled her. She had come of a
good family; he of, seemingly, no family at all. When the two married,
Milly's people went through that ablutionary process known as washing
their hands of her. Thus ideally mismated they tried to make the best of
it--and failed. At least, Sam Pardee failed. Milly Pardee said,
"Goodness knows I tried to be a good wife to him." The plaint of all
unappreciated wives since Griselda.

Theirs was a feast-and-famine existence. Sometimes Sam Pardee made
sudden thousands. Mrs. Pardee would buy silver, linen, and other
household furnishings ranging all the way from a grand piano to a patent
washing machine. The piano and the washing machine usually were whisked
away within a few weeks or months, at the longest. But she cannily had
the linen and silver stamped--stamped unmistakably and irrevocably with
a large, flourishing capital P, embellished with floral wreaths.
Eventually some of the silver went the way of the piano and washing
machine. But Milly Pardee clung stubbornly to a dozen and a half of
everything. She seemed to feel that if once she had less than eighteen
fish forks the last of the solid ground of family res