An unmarried man is a good deal like a piece of unimproved real estate—he may be worth a whole lot of money, but he isn’t of any particular use except to build on. The great trouble with a lot of these fellows is that they’re “made land,” and if you dig down a few feet you strike ooze and booze under the layer of dollars that their daddies dumped in on top. Of course, the only way to deal with a proposition of that sort is to drive forty-foot piles clear down to solid rock and then to lay railroad iron and cement till you’ve got something to build on. But a lot of women will go right ahead without any preliminaries and wonder what’s the matter when the walls begin to crack and tumble about their ears.
I never come across a case of this sort without thinking of Jack Carter, whose father died about ten years ago and left Jack a million dollars, and left me as trustee of both until Jack reached his twenty-fifth birthday. I didn’t relish the job particularly, because Jack was one of these charlotte-russe boys, all whipped cream and sponge cake and high-priced flavoring extracts, without any filling qualities. There wasn’t any special harm in him, but there wasn’t any special good, either, and I always feel that there’s more hope for a fellow who’s an out and out cuss than for one who’s simply made up of a lot of little trifling meannesses. Jack wore mighty warm clothes and mighty hot vests, and the girls all said that he was a perfect dream, but I’ve never been one who could get a great deal of satisfaction out of dreams.
It’s mighty seldom that I do an exhibition mile, but the winter after I inherited Jack—he was twenty-three years old then—your Ma kept after me so strong that I finally put on my fancy harness and let her trot me around to a meet at the Ralstons one evening. Of course, I was in the Percheron class, and so I just stood around with a lot of heavy old draft horses, who ought to have been resting up in their stalls, and watched the three-year-olds prance and cavort round the ring. Jack was among them, of course, dancing with the youngest Churchill girl, and holding her a little tighter, I thought, than was necessary to keep her from falling. Had both ends working at once—never missed a stitch with his heels and was turning out a steady stream of fancy work with his mouth. And all the time he was looking at that girl as intent and eager as a Scotch terrier at a rat hole.
I happened just then to be pinned into a corner with two or three women who couldn’t escape—Edith Curzon, a great big brunette whom I knew Jack had been pretty soft on, and little Mabel Moore, a nice roly-poly blonde, and it didn’t take me long to see that they were watching Jack with a hair-pulling itch in their finger-tips. In fact, it looked to me as if the young scamp was a good deal more popular than the facts about him, as I knew them, warranted him in being.
I slipped out early, but next evening, when I was sitting in my little smoking-room, Jack came charging in, and, without any sparring for an opening, burst out with:
“Isn’t she a stunner, Mr. Graham!”
I allowed that Miss Curzon was something on the stun.
“Miss Curzon, indeed,” he sniffed. “She’s well enough in a big, black way, but Miss Churchill——” and he began to paw the air for adjectives.
“But how was I to know that you meant Miss Churchill?” I answered. “It’s just a fortnight now since you told me that Miss Curzon was a goddess, and that she was going to reign in your life and make it a heaven, or something of that sort. I forget just the words, but they were mighty beautiful thoughts and did you credit.”
“Don’t remind me of it,” Jack groaned. “It makes me sick every time I think what an ass I’ve been.”