“It is just what I’ve got to do!” he insisted. “And if you think it would be a mistake for me to marry a widow, why—it’s for you to say.”
“I must say that I think it would be a great mistake for a doctor to marry a woman who looks as if she couldn’t live through the week,” she responded. “I should suppose it would ruin any physician’s practice to have a wife as woebegone as that Mrs. Poole! Of course, I don’t know her, and I’ve nothing to say against her, and she may be as beautiful and as charming as you say she is.”
“I give her up at once,” he declared, laughing. “She shall never even know how near she came to having a chance to reject me.”
“Is that all?” the girl asked, a little spitefully. “Have you anybody else on your list?”
“I have only just one more,” he replied.
“Who is she?” was the girl’s quick question.
“I’m not sure that you have met her,” he returned. “She’s from the South somewhere, or the Southwest, I don’t know—”
“What’s her name?” was the impatient query.
“Chubb,” he answered. “It’s not a pretty name, is it? But that doesn’t matter if I’m to persuade her to change it.”
“Chubb?” the girl repeated, as though trying to recall the name. “Chubb? Not Virgie Chubb?”