," I replied, and we shook hands on it. Then he began about
Bella; it was very tiresome.

Bella is a nice girl, but I had roomed with her at school, and I was
under no illusions. When Jim raved about Bella and her banjo, and Bella
and her guitar, I had painful moments when I recalled Bella, learning
her two songs on each instrument, and the old English ballad she had
learned to play on the harp. When he said she was too good for him, I
never batted an eye. And I shook hands solemnly across the tea-table
again, and wished him happiness--which was sincere enough, but
hopeless--and said we had only been playing a game, but that it was time
to stop playing. Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very touching.

We had been the best of friends ever since. Two days before the wedding
he came around from his tailor's, and we burned all his letters to me.
He would read one and say: "Here's a crackerjack, Kit," and pass it
to me. And after I had read it we would lay it on the firelog, and Jim
would say, "I am not worthy of her, Kit. I wonder if I can make her
happy?" Or--"Did you know that the Duke of Belford proposed to her in
London last winter?"

Of course, one has to take the woman's word about a thing like that, but
the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard all that winter.

You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to be
reminiscently sentimental, a sort of how-silly-we-were-but-it-is
all-over-now occasion, became actually a two hours' eulogy of Bella. And
just when I was bored to death, the Mercer girls dropped in and heard
Jim begin to read one commencing "dearest Kit." And the next day after
the rehearsal dinner, they told Bella!

There was very nearly no wedding at all. Bella came to see me in a
frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd pounds in
my face, and although I explained it all over and over, she never quite
forgave me. That was what made it so hard later--the situation would
have been bad enough without that complication.

They went abroad on their wedding journey, and stayed several months.
And when Jim came back he was fatter than ever. Everybody noticed it.
Bella had a gymnasium fitted up in a corner of the studio, but he would
not use it. He smoked a pipe and painted all day, and drank beer and
WOULD eat starches or whatever it is that is fattening. But he adored
Bella, and he was madly jealous of her. At dinners he used to glare at
the man who took h