His next:—“There’s a woman here who wants me to marry her. Won’t you help me? Harvey.”
Her last:—“There’s a man here who is going to marry me. Why don’t you marry her? Naughty! Naughty! Nellie.”
He gave up in despair at this. On Sunday he allowed Mrs. Davis to bullyrag him into a tentative engagement. Then he began to droop. He had done a bit of investigating on his own account before going up to dine with her. She had been married to Davis forty-two years and then he died. If their only daughter had lived she would be forty-one years of age, and, if married, would doubtless be the mother of a daughter who might also in turn be the mother of a child. Figuring back, he made out that under these circumstances Mrs. Davis might very easily have been a great-grandmother. With 223 this appalling thought in mind, he was quite firm in his determination to reject the old lady’s proposal. Mrs. Davis taking Nellie’s place! Pretty, gay, vivacious Nellie! It was too absurd for words.
But he went home an engaged man, just the same.
They were to be married in September of the following year, many months off.
That afternoon he saw a few gray hairs just above his ears and pulled them out. After that he looked for them every day. It was amazing how rapidly they increased despite his efforts to exterminate them. He began to grow careless in the matter of dress. His much talked of checked suits and lavender waistcoats took on spots and creases; his gaudy neckties became soiled and frayed; his fancy Newmarket overcoat, the like of which was only to be seen in Blakeville when some travelling theatrical troupe came to town, looked seedy, unbrushed, and sadly wrinkled. He forgot to shave for days at a time.
His only excuse to himself was, What’s the use?
During the holidays, in the midst of a cheerful 224 season of buying presents for Phoebe—and a bracelet for Nellie—he saw in the Patriot, under big headlines, the thing that served as the last straw for his already sagging back. The announcement was being made in all the metropolitan newspapers that “Nellie Duluth, the most popular and the most beautiful of all the comic opera stars,” was to quit the stage forever on the first of the year to become the wife of “the great financier, L. Z. Fairfax, long a devoted admirer.”
The happy couple were to spend the honeymoon on the groom’s yacht, sailing in February for an extended cruise of the Mediterranean and other “sunny waters of the globe,” primarily for pleasure but actually in the hope of restoring Miss Duluth to her normal state of health. A breakdown, brought on no doubt by the publicity attending her divorce a few months earlier, made it absolutely imperative, said the newspapers, for her to give up the arduous work of her chosen profession.
Harvey did not send the bracelet to her.