His ordinarily good-natured countenance was suffused with anger and perspiration.  His irritation with Mr. Tunnygate had reached the point of explosion.  Tunnygate was a thankless friend and he was a great cross to Mr. Appleboy.  Aforetime the two had been intimate in the fraternal, taciturn intimacy characteristic of fat men, an attraction perhaps akin to that exerted for one another by celestial bodies of great mass, for it is a fact that stout people do gravitate toward one another—­and hang or float in placid juxtaposition, perhaps merely as a physical result of their avoirdupois.  So Appleboy and Tunnygate had swum into each other’s spheres of influence, either blown by the dallying winds of chance or drawn by some mysterious animal magnetism, and, being both addicted to the delights of the soporific sport sanctified by Izaak Walton, had raised unto themselves portable temples upon the shores of Long Island Sound in that part of the geographical limits of the Greater City known as Throggs Neck.

Every morn during the heat of the summer months Appleboy would rouse Tunnygate or conversely Tunnygate would rouse Appleboy, and each in his own wobbly skiff would row out to the spot which seemed most propitious to the piscatorial art.  There, under two green umbrellas, like two fat rajahs in their shaking howdahs upon the backs of two white elephants, the friends would sit in solemn equanimity awaiting the evasive cunner, the vagrant perch or cod or the occasional flirtatious eel.  They rarely spoke and when they did the edifice of their conversation—­their Tower of Babel, so to speak—­was monosyllabic.  Thus: 

“Huh!  Ain’t had a bite!”

“Huh!”

“Huh!”

Silence for forty minutes.  Then:  “Huh!  Had a bite?”

“Nope!”

“Huh!”

That was generally the sum total of their interchange Yet it satisfied them, for their souls were in harmony.  To them it was pregnant of unutterable meanings, of philosophic mysteries more subtle than those of the esoterics, of flowers and poetry, of bird-song and twilight, of all the nuances of softly whispered avowals, of the elusive harmonies of love’s half-fainting ecstasy.

“Huh!”

“Huh!”

And then into this Eden—­only not by virtue of the excision of any vertebra such as was originally necessary in the case of Adam—­burst woman.  There was silence no longer.  The air was rent with clamor; for both Appleboy and Tunnygate, within a month of one another, took unto themselves wives.  Wives after their own image!

For a while things went well enough; it takes ladies a few weeks to find out each other’s weak points.  But then the new Mrs. Tunnygate unexpectedly yet undeniably began to exhibit the serpent’s tooth, the adder’s tongue or the cloven hoof—­as the reader’s literary traditions may lead him to prefer.  For no obvious reason at all she conceived a violent hatred of Mrs. Appleboy, a hatred that waxed all the more virulent on account of its object’s innocently obstinate refusal to comprehend or recognize it.  Indeed Mrs. Tunnygate found it so difficult to rouse Mrs. Appleboy into a state of belligerency sufficiently interesting that she soon transferred her energies to the more worthy task of making Appleboy’s life a burden to him.