No; nothing for me to say and nothing to do.  Here was one happy love match.  So I come home, making Vida promise to write often.

She did write about six times in the next three years.  The chief fact standing out was that the right opening for Clyde hadn’t opened yet—­and he was getting more impatient every day.  He always had something in view.  But I judged he was far-sighted.  And some way when he had got his rope over a job the hondoo wouldn’t seem to render.  He couldn’t cinch anything.  He was as full of blandishment as ever, though, and not a one of his staunch old friends had dropped him on account of his unfortunate marriage.  He was a great diner-out and spent lots of week-ends, and just now was on a jolly houseboat in Florida for three months with an old college mate worth nine million dollars, and wasn’t that nice!  She could just see him keeping the whole party gay with his mandolin and his songs.  The summer before that this same friend had let Clyde have an elegant motor car for his own use, and the foolish boy had actually took her out in it one Sunday, there being a pongee motor coat in the car that fit her beautifully so that none of his rich friends could have told she wasn’t dressed as smartly as they was.  He not only kept her out all afternoon, but would have took her to dinner some place only she had to get back to the boarding house because you couldn’t trust these raw Swedes.

And there was one thing she was going to bring herself to confess to me, no matter if it did sound disloyal—­a dreadful thing about Clyde.  It was ugly of her to breathe a word against him, but she was greatly worried and mebbe I could help her.  The horrible truth was that her boy was betraying an inclination to get fat, and he’d only laugh at her when she warned him.  Many a night her pillow had been wet with tears on this account, and did I believe in any of these remedies for reducing?  Wasn’t there something she could slip into his pudding that would keep him down without his knowing it, because otherwise, though it was a thing no true wife ought to say, her beloved would dig his grave with his teeth.

I thought that was about enough and even ample.  I started a hot answer to this letter, saying that if darling Clyde was digging his grave with his teeth it was her own fault because she was providing the spade and the burial plot, and the quickest way to thin her darling down would be for her to quit work.  But shucks!  Why insult the poor thing?  I got back my composure and wrote her a nice letter of sympathy in her hour of great trouble.  I didn’t say at all that if I had been in her place Mr. Clyde would of long since had my permission to go to the devil.  Yes, sir; I’d have had that lad going south early in the second year.  Mebbe not at that!  A woman never really knows how some other man might of made a fool of her.