THE TRIUMPH OF THE NUT
or
TOO MANY MARRIAGES
I
There was a man named Webster, who lived in a town in the State of Wisconsin and he made patent washing machines. He had a wife named Mary and a daughter named Jane and a stenographer named Natalie. And he used to have dreams, which was no great matter until he began to practise what he dreamed.
And so there was this Webster, and then this thing happened to him. He began to feel strange feelings and movements within his head, as though it were a newly wound watch.
He found it hard to sit still in one spot and impossible to sit still in two spots. So he walked rapidly to and fro, in and out of office and factory, and he thought: “Perhaps I am becoming a little insane. But I like myself better this way.” Which, considering what kind of man he had been, was not strange.
He stopped in front of Natalie and looked hard at her. She looked hard, too, though not at him. She just naturally looked hard because she was a pretty hard case, in her own way.
Suddenly it was clear to John Webster that Natalie was not a woman. She was a house. When she raised her eyes she raised the windows of the house and when she raised her voice she raised the roof. She was short and broad—a bungalow, then, with no upper story at all, nothing above the eaves.
So then Natalie was a house, a new thought. Probably other people were houses too; his own wife, perhaps. He must look to see what kind of a house she was. Was she an eligible family residence, suitable for permanent occupancy, or merely a boarding house, to be left at short notice—if one preferred, let us say, a nice little bungalow?
And so there he was on his way home for lunch and an inspection of his wife.