When a Man Marries

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mr. Harbison went out, muttering something about a storm coming up, and seeing that the tent was secure. Betty Mercer went with him. She had been at his heels all evening, and called him “Tom” on every possible occasion. Indeed, she made no secret of it; she said that she was mad about him, and that she would love to live in South America, and have an Indian squaw for a lady’s maid, and sit out on the veranda in the evenings and watch the Southern Cross shooting across the sky, and eat tropical food from the quaint Indian pottery. She was not even daunted when Dal told her the Southern Cross did not shoot, and that the food was probably canned corn on tin dishes.

So Betty went with him. She wore a pale yellow dinner gown, with just a sophisticated touch of black here and there, and cut modestly square in the neck. Her shoulders are scrawny. And after they were gone—not her shoulders; Mr. Harbison and she—Aunt Selina announced that the next day was Monday, that she had only a week’s supply of clothing with her, and that no policeman who ever swung a mace should wash her undergarments for her.

She paused a moment, but nobody offered to do it. Anne was reading De Maupassant under cover of a table, and the rest pretended not to hear. After a pause, Aunt Selina got up heavily and went upstairs, coming down soon after with a bundle covered with a green shawl, and with a white balbriggan stocking trailing from an opening in it. She paused at the library door, surveyed the inmates, caught my unlucky eye and beckoned to me with a relentless forefinger.

“We can put them to soak tonight,” she confided to me, “and tomorrow they will be quite simple to do. There is no lace to speak of”—Dal raised his eyebrows—“and very little flouncing.”

Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry. It never occurred to any one that Bella should have gone; she had stepped into all my privileges—such as they were—and assumed none of my obligations. Aunt Selina and I went to the laundry.

It is strange what big things develop from little ones. In this case it was a bar of soap. And if Flannigan had used as much soap as he should have instead of washing up the kitchen floor with cold dish water, it would have developed sooner. The two most unexpected events of the whole quarantine occurred that night at the same time, one on the roof and one in the cellar. The cellar one, although curious, was not so serious as the other, so it comes first.

Aunt Selina put her clothes in a tub in the laundry and proceeded to dress them like a vegetable. She threw in a handful of salt, some kerosene oil and a little ammonia. The result was villainous, but after she tasted it—or snuffed it—she said it needed a bar of soap cut up to give it strength—or flavor—and I went into the store room for it.

The laundry soap was in a box. I took in a silver fork, for I hated to touch the stuff, and jabbed a bar successfully in the semi-darkness. Then I carried it back to the laundry and dropped it on the table. Aunt Selina looked at the fork with disgust; then we both looked at the soap. ONE SIDE OF IT WAS COVERED WITH ROUND HOLES THAT CURVED AROUND ON EACH OTHER LIKE A COILED SNAKE.

I ran back to the store room, and there, a little bit sticky and smelling terribly of rosin, lay Anne’s pearl necklace!

I was so excited that I seized Aunt Selina by the hands and danced her all over the place. Then I left her, trying to find her hair pins on the floor, and ran up to tell the others. I met Betty in the hall and waved the pearls at her. But she did not notice them.