"He courted me every way but the right way. Now there is only one way to court a woman and that is to kiss her. You can get some of them to marry you the other way—that is, by making them think they are little tin goddesses, or stars ’way up above you, and all that, or by writing them poetry and not daring to look at them except through a long-distance telescope! "After five or six years and an innumerable number of family prayers and pink teas you can get that kind to wed you. But she isn’t worth much after you win her; for you get a little pink-tea wife who presents you, in the course of the first ten years, with one little offspring, and devotes the rest of her time to pills and hospital operations for appendicitis. Instead of going in for addition they go in for subtraction, Jack." "Well, Jack, after you and Eloise married, I began to feel lonesome, and I felt sorry for poor old Gott, pottering around out there among his books and flowers, with nobody to take care of him. I used to ride by to see him every day, thinking maybe he’d have sense enough to court me in a decent way; but every time he would act worse, until it got so that the poor man couldn’t talk at all in my presence; he could only fold his hands and sigh. "I knew the disease was running its course, and I became very uneasy. In this stage the patient, in addition to all the previous symptoms, has a steady rising temperature and becomes mentally unbalanced. This is shown in intense jealousy, a disease of mind produced by nothing else in the world but this malady. This hallucination takes violent possession of the mind, so that he is ready to shoot, kill or stab anyone whom he thinks stands in the way of his one great love; or, failing in that, to kill himself on the slightest provocation. It makes them do all kinds of queer things. "And he rapidly developed into the last stage, which is complete imbecility. "There was nothing for me to do, Jack; I must save poor Gott’s life and mind. It would be hard on me, I knew, but for thirty years I had taken care of him, even giving him a home; and I could not bear to see the poor man, in his old age, become an imbecile and a suicide for want of a little help from me. "As he was practically an imbecile already I decided to treat him as such; to cajole him, to entrap him, to lead him into matrimony by making him think it was something beautiful, and enchanting, ’up a winding stair,’ so to speak; a hot house at the end of a rainbow! "And this is the way it happened: I first hunted up that old red flower and pinned it over my heart. Then I took a flask of Tennessee whiskey in my saddle-bag and rode over to his house.