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.
"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!