"Or anything at all," persisted my Husband, "except that she says 'Kindness' and nothing else, you notice, except just 'Kindness.' No suggestions, you observe? No advice? And at an acid moment in his life of such unprecedented shock and general nervous disorganization when his only conceivable chance of 'come-back' perhaps, hangs on the alkaline wag of a strange dog's tail or the tune of a street piano proving balm not blister. By to-morrow—I think—you won't see him holding hands with the May Girl nor with any other woman. Personally," confided my Husband a bit abruptly, "I rather like the fellow! Even in the worst of his plight last night there was a certain fundamental sort of poise and dignity about him as of one who would say, 'Bad as this is, you chaps must see that I'd stand ready with my life to do the same for you'!"
"To—do—the same—for you?" gasped the Bride. Very quietly, like an offended young princess, she rose from the table and stood for that single protesting moment with her hand on her Bridegroom's shoulder. Her eager, academic young face was frankly aghast,—her voice distinctly strained. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I quite fail to see how the word 'dignity' could possibly be applied to any man who had so debased himself as to go and get drunk because his wife and child were dead!"
"You talk," said my Husband, "as though you thought 'getting drunk' was some sort of jocular sport. It isn't! That is, not inevitably, you know!"
"No—I didn't—know," murmured the Bride coldly.
"Deplorable as the result proved to be," interposed George Keets's smooth, carefully modulated voice, "it's hardly probable I suppose that the poor devil started out with the one deliberate purpose of—of debasing him self, as Mrs. Brenswick calls it."
"N-o?" questioned the Bride.
"It isn't exactly, you mean, as though he'd leapt from the church shouting, 'Yo—ho—, and a bottle of rum,'" observed young Kennilworth with one faintly-twisted eyebrow.
"S-s-h!" admonished everybody.
"Maybe he simply hadn't eaten for days," suggested my Husband.
"Or slept for nights and nights," frowned George Keets.