overheard him after a while and leaned round and said to me, "How do you and young Mr. Burke get on?" in her "strictly private" manner—Jessie's[Pg 60] strictly private manner is about as private as the Monument. [Pg 60] "Not badly," I replied, to punish Jim. "We're gradually getting acquainted." Jim sneered under his mustache. "It's the most shameful scheme two women ever put up," he said, as if he were joking. "Oh, has Jessie told you?" I exclaimed, pretending to be concealing my vexation. "It's the talk of the town," he answered, showing his teeth in a grin that was all fury and no fun. There may be women idiots enough to marry a man who warns them in advance that he's rabidly jealous, but I'm not one of them. Better a crust in quietness. [Pg 61] III December 27. Three weeks simply boiling with business since I wrote here—and it seems not more than so many days. And all by way of preparation, for the actual season is still five days away. December I can hardly realize that Mrs. Burke is the same person I looked at so dubiously two days less than a month ago. Truly, the right sort of us Americans are wonderful people. To begin with her appearance: her hair isn't "bottled," as she called it, any more. It's beautiful[Pg 62] iron-gray, and softens her features and permits all the placid kindliness and humor of her face to show. Then there's her dress—gracious, how tight-looking she was! A thin woman can, and should, wear close things. But no woman who wishes to look like a lady must ever wear anything tight. To be tight in one's clothes is to be tight in one's talk, manner, thought—and that means—well, common. What an expressive word "common" is, yet I'm sure I couldn't define it. [Pg 62] For a fat woman to be tight is—revolting! My idea of misery is a fat woman in a tight waist and tight shoes. Yet fat women have a mania for wearing tight things, just as gaunt women yearn for stripes and short women for flounces. My first move in getting Mrs. Burke into shape—after doing away[Pg 63] with that dreadful "bottled" hair—was to put her into comfortable clothes. The first time I got her into an evening dress of the right sort I was rewarded for all my trouble by her
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