“If you mean,” I said finally in desperation, “that you and Bella are—­are in love, why don’t you say so, Jim?  I think you will find that I stand it wonderfully.”

He brightened perceptibly.

“I didn’t know how you would take it, Kit,” he said, “and I hope we will always be bully friends.  You are absolutely sure you don’t care a whoop for me?”

“Absolutely,” I replied, and we shook hands on it.  Then he began about Bella; it was very tiresome.

Bella is a nice girl, but I had roomed with her at school, and I was under no illusions.  When Jim raved about Bella and her banjo, and Bella and her guitar, I had painful moments when I recalled Bella, learning her two songs on each instrument, and the old English ballad she had learned to play on the harp.  When he said she was too good for him, I never batted an eye.  And I shook hands solemnly across the tea-table again, and wished him happiness—­which was sincere enough, but hopeless—­and said we had only been playing a game, but that it was time to stop playing.  Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very touching.

We had been the best of friends ever since.  Two days before the wedding he came around from his tailor’s, and we burned all his letters to me.  He would read one and say:  “Here’s a crackerjack, Kit,” and pass it to me.  And after I had read it we would lay it on the firelog, and Jim would say, “I am not worthy of her, Kit.  I wonder if I can make her happy?” Or—­“Did you know that the Duke of Belford proposed to her in London last winter?”

Of course, one has to take the woman’s word about a thing like that, but the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard all that winter.

You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to be reminiscently sentimental, a sort of how-silly-we-were-but-it-is-all-over-now occasion, became actually a two hours’ eulogy of Bella.  And just when I was bored to death, the Mercer girls dropped in and heard Jim begin to read one commencing “dearest Kit.”  And the next day after the rehearsal dinner, they told Bella!

There was very nearly no wedding at all.  Bella came to see me in a frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd pounds in my face, and although I explained it all over and over, she never quite forgave me.  That was what made it so hard later—­the situation would have been bad enough without that complication.

They went abroad on their wedding journey, and stayed several months.  And when Jim came back he was fatter than ever.  Everybody noticed it.  Bella had a gymnasium fitted up in a corner of the studio, but he would not use it.  He smoked a pipe and painted all day, and drank beer and would eat starches or whatever it is that is fattening.  But he adored Bella, and he was madly jealous of her.  At dinners he used to glare at the man who took her in, although it did not make him thin.  Bella was flirting, too, and by the time they had been married a year, people hitched their chairs together and dropped their voices when they were mentioned.