There was a long time during which I thought the reason she returned to me--or, rather, let me return to her--was because she fell out of love with him. Then there was a still longer time when I thought the reason was the fact that the very Saturday I got a raise to fourteen a week, he fell from twelve to eight. But latterly I have known the truth. How many of us know the truth, the down-at-the-bottom, absolute truth, about why she married us instead of the other fellow? Very few, I guess--or we’d be puffing our crops and flirting our feathers less cantily. She took up with me again because he dropped her. It was he that saved her, not she or I. Only a few months ago, her old mother, doddering on in senility, with memory dead except for early happenings, and these fresh and vivid, said: “And when I think how nigh Edny come to marryin’ up with that there loud-smelling dude of a Charley Putney! If he hadn’t ’a give her the go by, she’d sure ’a made a fool of herself--a wantin’ me and her paw to offer him money and a job in the undertakin’ store, to git him back. Lawsy me! What a narrer squeak fur Princess Edny!” Be patient, gentle reader! You shall soon be reading things that will efface the coarse impression my old mother-in-law’s language and all these franknesses about our beginnings must have made upon your refined and cultured nature. Swallow a caramel and be patient. But don’t skip these pages. If you should, you would miss the stimulating effect of contrast, not to speak of other benefits which I, probably vainly, hope to confer upon you. She didn’t love me. Looking back, I see that for many months she found it difficult to endure me. But it was necessary that she carry off--with the neighborhood rather than with me--her pretense of having cast off Charley because she preferred me. We can do wonders in the way of concealing wounded pride; we can do equal wonders in the way of preserving a reputation for unbroken victory. And I believe she honestly liked me. Perhaps she liked me even more than she liked her aromatic Charley; for, it by no means follows that we like best where we love most. I am loth to believe--I do not believe--that at so early an age, not quite seventeen, she could have received my caresses and returned them with plausibility enough to deceive me, unless she had genuinely liked me. And what a lucky fellow I thought myself! And how I patronized the perfumed man. And what a thrashing I gave him--poor, harmless, witless creature!--when I heard of his boastings that he had dropped Edna Wheatlands because he found Sally Simpson prettier and more _cultured_!