“And the matter was thrashed out satisfactorily in five minutes, where an English girl would have taken five weeks. ‘I guess there’s a good deal more of you than ever either of us expected there would be,’ said Mamie; ‘but I’ve got to choose between having too much of the man I love, or nothing at all. And it seems mighty unreasonable—when I felt plum-sure at Klümpenstein that I could never have enough of you—that I should be miserable here in London because there happens to be a good deal more than there was then.’ With a gush of warm and affectionate devotion she twined her arms as far round Shelmadine as they would go, and he, in accepting the fate that made him the husband of Miss Mamie Van Kyper, renounced his silhouette for ever!�
“But you said he got it back again!� said the second man.
“He has,� said the first man.
“Without the assistance of Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of Marius Duchâtel, herbalist, of Geneva?� queried the second man.
“Mariette,� said the first man, “on finding Shelmadine indisposed to accept her offer, first attempted to commit suicide in a cistern; then threw up the sponge and made a clean breast of everything. A peculiar vegetable preparation, the secret of which she had had from her father, the herbalist of Geneva, administered in Shelmadine’s food, had caused the extraordinary accumulation of adipose tissue. The antidote, which she had promised to administer in the intervals of her own designs on my poor friend’s freedom, she confided to him, with bitter tears and many entreaties for forgiveness, before she went out of the Bond Street flat and Shelmadine’s life for ever.�
“He married Miss Van Kyper immediately. He has an Assistant-Principal clerkship at the Ordnance Office; he has recovered his silhouette, but he no longer cares for clothes. You could scare rooks with him as he dresses now. Fact!�
“Facts are confoundedly rummy things!� said the man who had been told the story.
A NOCTURNE
“YOU look,� He said nastily, as She raised her disheveled coiffure and tear-blurred features from the center of a large muslin-flounced and covered cushion that sat at the end of the lounge that opened like a box, and held frilled petticoats—“you look like a wilted prize chrysanthemum.�
She mechanically put up one hand to drive home deserting hairpins into the mass of hair He had, in the lyrical days of early passion, celebrated as Corinthian gold-bronze, in a halting sonnet of which he was now profoundly ashamed. Stifling the recurrent hiccough that accompanies a liberal effusion of tears, she stared at him blankly.