nd a box of soap,
which sounds incongruous, doesn't it?

It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim was
rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the lines of
his face, or what should have been lines, were really dimples, his face
was about as flexible and full of expression as a pillow in a tight
cover. The angrier he got the funnier he looked, and when he was raging,
and his neck swelled up over his collar and got red, he was entrancing.
And everybody liked him, and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his
pictures (he has one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people
buy them instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his
Jap. The whole story hinges on the Jap.

The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His ambition
in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily refused to. His
art was a huge joke--except to himself. If he asked people to dinner,
every one expected a frolic. When he married Bella Knowles, people
chuckled at the wedding, and considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy's
career, although Jim himself seemed to take it awfully hard.

We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with Bella,
and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married Jim. My first
winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention. He painted my portrait
in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit it. It was a very nice picture,
but it did not look like me, so I stayed away from the exhibition. Jim
asked me to. He said he was not a photographer, and that anyhow the rest
of my features called for the nose he had given me, and that all the
Greuze women have long necks. I have not.

After I had refused Jim twice he met Bella at a camp in the Adirondacks
and when he came back he came at once to see me. He seemed to think I
would be sorry to lose him, and he blundered over the telling for twenty
minutes. Of course, no woman likes to lose a lover, no matter what she
may say about it, but Jim had been getting on my nerves for some time,
and I was much calmer than he expected me to be.

"If you mean," I said finally in desperation, "that you and Bella
are--are in love, why don't you say so, Jim? I think you will find that
I stand it wonderfully."

He brightened perceptibly.

"I didn't know how you would take it, Kit," he said, "and I hope we will
always be bully friends. You are absolutely sure you don't care a whoop
for me?"

"Absolutely