But the greatest miracle, the miraculousness—I don't know there is such a word, but there should be—of which sets me wondering continually, is that she should have been willing to marry an odd, inconsequential sort of stick like me. And I find myself saying over and over: “WHAT have I ever done to deserve it?...”
Mr. Cabot was reading the letter from which these extracts were made to a relative, a Miss Deborah Cabot, known to him and the family as “Third Cousin Deborah.” At this point in the reading he looked up and laughed.
“By Jove!” he exclaimed. “Isn't that characteristic? Isn't that like him? Well, I told him once that he was magnificent. And he is, not as I meant it then, but literally.”
Third Cousin Deborah sniffed through her thin nostrils. “Well, perhaps,” she admitted, “but such a performance as this marriage of his is a little too much. I can't understand him, Augustus. I confess he is quite beyond ME.”
Cabot smiled. “In many things—and possibly the things that count most, after all, Deborah,” he observed, “I have come to the conclusion that old Galusha is far beyond the majority of us.”