When the dreadful thing occurred that night, every
one turned on me. The injustice of it hurt me
most. They said I got up the dinner, that I asked
them to give up other engagements and come, that I
promised all kinds of jollification, if they would
come; and then when they did come and got in the papers
and every one—but ourselves—laughed
himself black in the face, they turned on me!
I, who suffered ten times to their one! I shall
never forget what Dallas Brown said to me, standing
with a coal shovel in one hand and a—well,
perhaps it would be better to tell it all in the order
it happened.
It began with Jimmy Wilson and a conspiracy, was helped
on by a foot-square piece of yellow paper and a Japanese
butler, and it enmeshed and mixed up generally ten
respectable members of society and a policeman.
Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar and a box
of soap, which sounds incongruous, doesn’t it?
It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for
a man. Jim was rotund and looked shorter than
he really was, and as all the lines of his face, or
what should have been lines, were really dimples,
his face was about as flexible and full of expression
as a pillow in a tight cover. The angrier he
got the funnier he looked, and when he was raging,
and his neck swelled up over his collar and got red,
he was entrancing. And everybody liked him, and
borrowed money from him, and laughed at his pictures
(he has one in the Hargrave gallery in London now,
so people buy them instead), and smoked his cigarettes,
and tried to steal his Jap. The whole story hinges
on the Jap.
The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously.
His ambition in life was to be taken seriously, but
people steadily refused to. His art was a huge
joke—except to himself. If he asked
people to dinner, every one expected a frolic.
When he married Bella Knowles, people chuckled at
the wedding, and considered it the wildest prank of
Jimmy’s career, although Jim himself seemed
to take it awfully hard.
We had all known them both for years. I went
to Farmington with Bella, and Anne Brown was her matron
of honor when she married Jim. My first winter
out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention. He
painted my portrait in oils and had a studio tea to
exhibit it. It was a very nice picture, but it
did not look like me, so I stayed away from the exhibition.
Jim asked me to. He said he was not a photographer,
and that anyhow the rest of my features called for
the nose he had given me, and that all the Greuze
women have long necks. I have not.
After I had refused Jim twice he met Bella at a camp
in the Adirondacks and when he came back he came at
once to see me. He seemed to think I would be
sorry to lose him, and he blundered over the telling
for twenty minutes. Of course, no woman likes
to lose a lover, no matter what she may say about
it, but Jim had been getting on my nerves for some
time, and I was much calmer than he expected me to
be.
