Fate is a trickster. Her game is based upon false pretenses—she should be forbidden the mails.
She sacrifices individuals by the thousand, for the good of the race. All she cares for is to perpetuate the kind.
Poor sailorman, innocent of petticoats, caught in the esoteric web, pumping water for Pollie Lumm—Pollie Lumm—plump, pert, pink and pretty.
And so they were married.
Their wedding-journey was in a scow, across to the bridegroom's ship, riding at anchor, her cordage creaking in the rising breeze.
Pollie Lumm, the bride of a day, was frightened there alone with a one-eyed man, when the rats went scurrying through the hold. She wasn't pink now; her color had turned to ashy yellow and her heart to ashes of roses. Girard could face the wind of the North, but a crying woman on a ship at anchor, whose rusty chains groaned to the dismal screech of tugging cordage, undid him. A lesser man—a devil-may-care fellow—could have met the issue. Girard, practical, sensible, silent, was no mate for prettiness, plump and pink. He should have wedded a widow, who could have passed him a prehensile hawser and taken his soul in tow.
The bride and groom rowed back, bedraggled, to the room over the store.
Pollie could not cook—she could not figure—she could not keep store—she could not read the "Philosophical Dictionary"—nor could she even listen while her husband read, without nodding her sleepy head. No baby came to rescue her from the shoals, and by responsibility and care win her safely back to sanity.
Poor Pollie Lumm Girard!
Poor Silly Sailorman!