the committee on the calendar, he
invariably came home with a few hundred dollars, three suits of clothes
and a railroad pass. No one but Charley Hedrick could live with him for
six months afterward.

It was when he returned from one of these profitable sessions that Abner
Handy and Nora Sinclair were married. The affinity between them was
this: his good clothes and proud manner caught her; and her social
position caught him. Everyone in town knew, however, that Nora Sinclair
had been too smart for Handy. She had him hooked through the gills
before he knew that he was more than nibbling at the bait. The town
concurred with Colonel Morrison--our only townsman who travelled widely
in those days--when he put it succinctly: "Ab Handy is Nora Sinclair's
last call for the dining-car."

Her influence on Abner Handy and his life was such that it is necessary
to record something of the kind of a woman she was before he met her. A
woman of the right sort might have made a man of Handy, even that late
in life. Strong, good women have made weak men fairly strong, but such
women were never girls like Nora. She was a nice enough little girl
until she became boy-struck--as our vernacular puts it. Her mother
thought this development of the child was "so cute," and told callers
about the boys who came to see Nora--before she was twelve. In those
days, and in some old-fashioned families in our town, little girls were
asked to run out to play when the neighbours had to be discussed. But
Mrs. Sinclair claimed Nora was "neither sugar nor salt nor anybody's
honey," and everything was talked over before the child. We knew at the
office from Colonel Morrison that his little girls did not play at the
Sinclairs'. Her mother put long dresses and picture hats upon her and
pushed her out into society, and the whole town knew that Nora was a
mature woman, in all her instincts, by the time she was sixteen. Her
mother, moreover, was manifestly proud that the child wasn't "one of
those long-legged, gangling tom-boy girls, who seem so backward" and
wear pigtails and chew slate pencils and dream.

The gilded youths who boarded at the Hotel Metropole began to notice
her. That pleased her mother also, and she said to the mothers of other
little girls of Nora's age who were climbing fences and wiping dishes:
"You know Nora is so popular with the gentlemen." When the girl was
seventeen she was engaged. She kept a town fellow and had a college
fellow. She