According to the Washingtonian custom, one of the new photographs appeared the following Sunday in each of the four newspapers. The Sunday after that Marie Louise’s likeness appeared with “Dolly Madison’s” and Jean Elliott’s syndicated letters on “The Week in Washington” in Sunday supplements throughout the country. Every now and then her likeness popped out at her from Town and Country, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The Spur, what not?
One of those countless images fell into the hands of Jake Nuddle, who had been keeping an incongruous eye on the Sunday supplements for some time. This time the double of Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in an English landscape, but as a woman of fashion in a Colonial drawing-room.
He hurried to his wife with the picture, and she called it “Mamise” with a recrudescent anguish of doubt.
“She’s in this country now, the paper says,” said Jake. “She’s in Washington, and if I was you I’d write her a little letter astin’ her is she our sister.”
Mrs. Nuddle was crying too loosely to note that “our.” The more Jake considered the matter the less he liked the thought of waiting for a letter to go and an answer to come.
“Meet ’em face to face; that’s me!” he declared at last. “I think I’ll just take a trip to the little old capital m’self. I can tell the rest the c’mittee I’m goin’ to put a few things up to some them Senators and Congersmen. That’ll get my expenses paid for me.”
There simply was nobody that Jake Nuddle would not cheat, if he could.
His always depressing wife suggested: “Supposin’ the lady says she ain’t Mamise, how you goin’ to prove she is? You never seen her.”
Jake snarled at her for a fool, but he knew that she was right. He resisted the dismal necessity as long as he could, and then extended one of his most cordial invitations: