gettin' married, let's have the wedding right away and get it over with."

When Ellaphine's mother learned that Ellaphine had a chance to marry an heir and was asking for time, Mrs. Govers delivered an oration that would have sent Ellaphine to the altar with almost anybody, let alone her idolized Eddie.

The wedding was a quiet affair. Everybody in Carthage was invited. Few came. People feared that if they went they would have to send wedding-presents, and Eddie and Ellar were too unimportant to the social life of Carthage to make their approval valuable.

Eddie wore new shoes, which creaked and pinched. He looked twice as uncomfortable and twice as sad as he had looked at his uncle Loren's obsequies; and he suffered that supreme disenchantment of a too-large collar with a necktie rampant.

In spite of the ancient and impregnable theory that all brides are beautiful, was there ever a woman who looked her best in the uniform of approaching servitude? In any case, Ellaphine's best was not good, and she was at her worst in her ill-fitting white gown, with the veil askew. Her graceless carriage was not improved by the difficulty of keeping step with her escort and the added task of keeping step with the music.

The organist, Mr. Norman Maugans, always grew temperamental when he played Mendelssohn's "Wedding March," and always relieved its monotonous cadence with passionate accelerations and abrupt retardations. That made walking difficult.

When the minister had finished with the couple and they moved down the aisle to what the paper called the "Bridle March, by Lohengrin," Mr. Maugans always craned his neck to see and usually put his foot on the wrong pedal, with the startling effect of firing a cannon at the departing guests.

He did not crane his neck, however, to see Mr. and Mrs. Pouch depart. They were too commonplace entirely. He played the march with such doleful indifference that Eddie found the aisle as long as the distance from Marathon to Athens. Also he was trying to walk so that his pinching shoes would not squeak.

At the end of the last pew Eddie and Ellaphine encountered Luella Thickins leaning out into the aisle and triumphantly beautiful in her finest raiment. Her charms were militant and vindictive, and her smile plainly said: "Uh-huh! Don't you wish you'd taken me instead of that thing you've hitched up with for life?"

Eddie gave her one glance and found her hideous. Ellaphine lowered her eyelids in defeat and slunk from the church, thinking:

"Now he's already sorry that he married me. What can he see in me to love? Nothing! Nothing!"

When they clambered into the carriage Eddie said, "Well, Mrs. Pouch, give your old husband a kiss!"

Ellaphine shrank away from him, however, crying again. He was hurt and puzzled until he remembered that it is the business of brides to cry. He held her hand and tried to console her for being his victim, and imagined almost every reason for her tears but the true one.

The guests at the church straggled to Mrs. Govers's home, drawn by the call of refreshments. Luella was the gayest of them all. People wondered why Eddie had not married her instead of Ellaphine. Luella heard some one say, "What on earth can he see in her?"

Luella answered, "What on earth can she see in him?" It was hardly playing fair, but Luella was a poor loser. She even added, to clinch it, "What on earth can they see in each other?"

That became the town comment on the couple when there was any comment at all. Mainly they were ignored completely.

Eddie and Ellar were not even honored with the usual outburst of the ignoblest of all sports—bride-baiting. Nobody tied a white ribbon to the wheel of the hack that took them to the depot. Old shoes had not been provided and rice had been forgotten. They were not pelted or subjected to immemorial jokes. They were not chased to the train, and their elaborate schemes for deceiving the neighbors as to the place of their honeymoon were wasted. Nobody cared where they went or how long they stayed.

They returned sheepishly, expecting to run a gantlet of humor; but people seemed unaware that they had been away. They settled down into the quiet pool of Carthage without a splash, like a pair of mud-turtles slipping off a log into the water. Even the interest in Eddie's inheritance did not last long, for Uncle Loren's fortune did not last long—not that they were spendthrift, for they spent next to nothing; but money must be fed or it starves to death. Money must grow or wither.

V

Eddie found that his uncle's reputation for hard dealing had been a condition of his success. He soon learned that the feather-duster factory could be run at a profit only by the most microscopic care. Wages must be kept down; hours kept up; the workers driven every minute, fined if they were late, nagged if they dawdled. Profit could be wrung from the trade only by ugly battles with dealers and purchasers. Raw material had to be fought down, finished product fought up; bills due fought off, accounts fought in; the smallest percentage of a percentage wrestled for.

Eddie was incapable of such vigilant hostility toward everybody. The factory almost immediately ceased to pay expenses. Eddie was prompt to meet debts, but lenient as a collector. The rest of his inheritance fared no better. Eddie was an ideal mortgagee. The first widow wept him out of his interest in five tears. Having obliged her, he could hardly deny the next person, who had money but wanted more, "to carry out a big deal."

Eddie first gained a reputation for being a kind-hearted gentleman and a Christian, and later a notoriety for being an easy mark. Eddie overheard such comment eventually, and it wounded him as deeply as it bewildered him. Bitterer than the contempt for a hard man is the contempt for a soft man who is betrayed by a vice of mercy. Eddie was hopelessly addicted to decency.

Uncle Loren had been a miser and so close that his nickname had implied the ability to skin a flint. People hated him and raged against him; but it suddenly became evident that they had worked hard to meet their bills payable to him. They had sat up nights devising schemes to gain cash for him. He was a cause of industry and thrift and self-denial. He paid poor wages, but he kept the factory going. He squeezed a penny until the eagle screamed, but he made dusters out of the tail feathers, and he was planning to branch out into whisk brooms and pillows when, in the words of the pastor, he was "called home." The pastor liked the phrase, as it did not commit him to any definite habitat.

Eddie, however, though he worked hard and used thrift, and, with Ellaphine's help, practised self-denial, found that he was not so big a man as the small man he succeeded. He increased the wages and cut down the hours, and found that he had diminished the output of everything except complaints. The men loafed shamelessly, cheated him of the energy and the material that belonged to him, and whined all the time. His debtors grew shiftless and contemptuous.

It is the irony, the meanness, of the trade of life that virtue may prove vicious in effect; and viciousness may produce good fruit. Figs do grow from thistles.

For a time the Pouch couple attracted a great deal of attention from the people of Carthage—the sort of attention that people on shore devote to a pair of capsized canoeists for whom nobody cares to risk his life.

Luella Thickins had forced the note of gaiety at the wedding, but she soon grew genuinely glad that Eddie had got away. She began to believe that she had jilted him.

VI

People who