It was the opportunity of Mary Brown's life, for even as Harry and I had decided, so had all the other jilted swains, but that curious girl either could not or would not grasp it. She, too, had become a Wilkinsite, and would have nothing to do with any of us. She declined to attend the Beldens's musicale with me, and went bicycling with the iceberg. She told Robinson she hated lectures, and went to a stereopticon show with the train-wrecker. All the other men met with a similar rebuff, and at the last meeting of the Chafing Dish Club she capped the climax by refusing my lobster à la Newburg and Harry's oysters poulet, to have a second helping to the sole-leather welsh rarebit which Wilkins had constructed; Wilkins, a rank outsider, who had been asked to come to the meeting by every blessed girl in the club, although heretofore he had not been considered as a possible member, and in fact had been black-balled by the girls themselves! And when it came time for the girls to go home, instead of each one being escorted by a single male member, Wilkins corralled the whole lot of them in a huge omnibus which he had hired, and drove off with them, leaving us disconsolate. He smiled so broadly you could see his teeth in the dark. This, as I have said, capped the climax. "That settles it," said Burnham. "I'm going to New York for a rest. These Dumfries Corners girls needn't think they're the only women in the world. There are others." "I'm going to stay and stick it out," said I. "I've got my sister left. She'll never succumb to the Wilkins influence." But alas! I leaned upon a broken reed. My sister is a sensible girl, but she is "literary." She had a joke in _Life_ once, and since that time she has neglected almost everything but writing and her brother. She doesn't neglect me, and altogether I'm glad she writes, since it fills her with enthusiasm until the articles come back, and up to now she had not written poetry. But, as I say, I leaned upon a broken reed, for when, the next day, I asked her what she was writing, she laughed and showed me a sonnet. "Poetry, eh?" I said, disapprovingly, as I looked over her manuscript. "Yes," she answered, modestly. "A sonnet." And I read, "To S.W." "Who's 'S.W.?'" I asked, with a frown, although I little suspected what her answer would be. "Sam Wilkins," she replied. I then realized the full force of Caesar's "Et tu, Brute?" and fled. Meanwhile Wilkins was becoming insufferable. If Bunthorne was an ass, he was at least clever, but this Wilkins--he was a whole drove of asses, and not a redeeming feature to the lot. He could no more account for his sudden popularity than we could, but he could not help realizing it after a week or two, and then, for the first time in his life, he began to take notice. We men all wanted to thrash him, and I think Burnham would have done it if the rest of us hadn't prevented him.