文档介绍：WHEN A MAN MARRIES
WHEN A MAN
MARRIES
Mary Roberts Rinehart
1
WHEN A MAN MARRIES
CHAPTER I. AT LEAST I
MEANT WELL
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 e, that I promised all kinds of
jollification, if they e; and then when they e 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