He dressed like a dandy and lived in a hall bedroom. He wore a pearl stick pin and gaiters and believed in “hunches” and went on fitting shoes. Naturally, all this time, he admitted, with one of his soft little laughs, there were affairs of the heart. He withheld nothing, but poured it out upon Stella in a warm, confounding torrent. Of course a man so magnetic could not very well escape the toils into which his sheer perfection of face and form attracted poor dazzled idolaters.
“I was always getting mash notes,” he said, “from women I didn’t know from Eve. They were sometimes on monogram stationery, and scented.... Women were always wanting to meet me, and inviting me to tea, and begging me to send them my photograph. I used to get so tired of it sometimes,” he sighed, yet quite happily. “You can’t imagine how tired I’d get. I used to want something else, but I never seemed to know just what....”
Serenely and without a blush, in this curious exaltation wherein all was tuned to the “master key,” King told his story to the girl he had finally married. Stella, breathing rapidly, her hands clasping and unclasping in her lap, saw again with singular vividness her husband coming out of the hut where Cha-cha-kamui’s Small Wife lived.
III
“I was forever laying plans,” he went on. “I kept planning to do all sorts of things, and just went on selling shoes. I was always figuring. I wanted to be rich and travel off over the world. I used to collect travel guides and vacation pamphlets wherever I could find them, in railroads and steamship offices and hotels. Sometimes you’d be surprised what beauties I’d pick up in the way of travel booklets! I would take them home and go through them, figuring and planning. I got after a while so I knew all the favourite tourist stopping places about as well as though I’d seen them.” He smiled with consummate satisfaction.
Stella caught her breath a little, and gazed at her husband with eyes staring and amazed. “But—” she faltered, out of her morass of disillusion. “But—Egypt—Monte Carlo—Waikiki...?”
King laughed gently. “Figures of speech, you might call them, I guess.”
“But Ferd—”
“I used to plan and figure about it all so much, sometimes I wasn’t quite sure myself whether I’d really seen places or only imagined I had. It got to be that way. But,” he went on with a new touch of eagerness in his voice, “there was one genuine little joy ride. One year a Rochester newspaper held a contest to decide who was the most popular clerk, and I won it! Just imagine that! All the women voted for me, and I got a free trip through Yellowstone Park and on out to the Coast. I always had that to build on. The rest was what I hoped I’d do some day....”
“But,” she murmured, “you were picked up at sea—Captain Utterbourne....”