You pick up your paper in the morning, and idly and slowly peruse the advertisements on the first page, forget it, eat some bacon, grumble at the youngest boy, open the paper, read the breach of promise case on page three, drop it, and ask your wife for more coffee—hot—glance at your letters again, then reopen the paper at the news page, and find that the Tsar of Russia has been murdered, and a few American cities tumbled to fragments by an earthquake—you know how you feel then. James Ollerenshaw felt like that. The captain of the bowling-club, however, poising a bowl in his right hand, and waiting for James Ollerenshaw to leave his silken dalliance, saw nothing but an old man and a young woman sitting on a Corporation seat.
CHAPTER III
MARRYING OFF A MOTHER
"Yes," said Helen Rathbone, "mother fell in love. Don't you think it was funny?"
"That's as may be," James Ollerenshaw replied, in his quality of the wiseacre who is accustomed to be sagacious on the least possible expenditure of words.
"We both thought it was awfully funny," Helen said.
"Both? Who else is there?"
"Why, mother and I, of course! We used to laugh over it. You see, mother is a very simple creature. And she's only forty-four."