“And what became of the curate and Gerard’s sister?”

“Oh, they married and went into steam.”

THE GREAT BUBBLE SYNDICATE

I suppose it was a fool arrangement, but anyway we did it; and Harry Prentiss, who is learning how to be a corporation lawyer and has specialized on contracts, spent a whole week making it what he called iron-clad.  When it was typewritten it covered nine pages, and was so excessively iron-clad that nobody could understand it but Harry.  He said it undoubtedly covered the ground, however, and would be worth all the trouble it cost him in the friction it would save afterward.  You’d hardly know Harry as the same boy that played Yale full-back, he’s grown so cynical and suspicious, and he’s got that lawyer way of looking at you now, as though you were a liar and he was just about to pounce on you with the truth.  I thought he might have brought Nelly and himself into the agreement under one head, considering he was engaged to her and they were only waiting to save a thousand dollars in order to get married; but he couldn’t see it in that way at all, and spoke about people changing their minds, and how in law you must be prepared for everything (especially if it were disagreeable and unexpected) and put supposistious cases till Nelly broke down and cried.

They had got five hundred toward the thousand when they were both taken with automobile fever—­and taken bad; and then they decided that, though marriage was all right, they were still young, and the bubble had the first call.  Harry had been secretly taking the Horseless Age for three months, and as for Nelly—­anybody with a four-cylinder tonneau could have torn her from her happy home.  Not that she didn’t love Harry tremendously.  She was crazy about him—­but crazier for a bubble.  It’s an infatuation like any other, only worse, and I guess I was no better than Nelly myself, for I used to ride regularly with Lewis Wentz and you know what Lewis Wentz is.  And he only had a wheezy old steam carriage anyway, and sometimes blue flames would leap up all around you till you felt like a Christian martyr, and his boiler was always burning out when he’d try to hold my hand instead of watching the gage.  You paid in every kind of way for riding with Lewis Wentz, and people talked about you besides—­but I always went just the same.  Oh, I know I ought to be ashamed to admit it, and I said to myself every time should be the last; yet he only had to double-toot at the front door for me to drop everything and run.  This naturally made him awfully forward and troublesome, not to speak of complicating me with pa, who didn’t approve of him the least bit, and who used to regale me with little talks beginning:  “I would rather see you lying dead in your coffin,” and winding up with, “Now, won’t you promise your poor old dad?” till I was all broken up.  But, as I said before, Lewis Wentz had only to toot for me to forget my old dad and the coffin and everything.