"If--you--don't--mind," she said, "I think I'll cut my sash in two and give half of it to Hanlon's Mary to make a dress for her baby." The medicine spoon dropped rather clatteringly out of Guthrie's hand. "But I sent all the way to Denver for it," he protested. "Oh, yes, I know all about that," she acknowledged. "But--what--can--a great big girl--like me--do with a--pink sash?" "But you said you wanted it!" cried Guthrie. "Why, it took a man and a pony and a telegraph station five entire days to get it, and they had to flag the express train specially for it--and--and--" A little wearily she closed her eyes and then opened them again blinkingly. "I'm pretty tired, now," she said, "so I don't want to talk about it--but don't you--understand? I've revised my whole list of necessities. Out of the wide--wide--world--I find that I don't really want anything--except--just--you!" WOMAN'S ONLY BUSINESS THE men at the club were horridly busy that night discussing the silly English law about marrying your dead wife's sister. The talk was quite rabid enough even before an English High-churchman infused his pious venom into the subject-matter. When the argument was at its highest and the drinks were at their lowest, Bertus Sagner, the biology man at the university, jumped up from his seat with blazing eyes and said "RATS!"--not anything long and Latin, not anything obscure and evasive, not even "rodents," but just plain "RATS!" The look on his face was inordinately disgusted, or indeed more than disgusted, unless disgust is perhaps an emotion that may at times be served red-hot. As he broke away from the gabbling crowd and began to hunt noisily round the room for his papers, I gathered up my own chemistry notebook and started after him. I was a new man in town and a comparative stranger. But Sagner and I had been chums once long ago in Berlin. At the outside door he turned now and eyed me a bit shamefacedly. "Barney, old man," he said, "are you going my way? Well, come along." The broad-shouldered breadth of the two of us blocked out the light from the shining chandelier and sent our clumsy feet fairly stumbling down the harsh granite steps. The jarring lurch exploded Sagner's irritation into a short, sharp, damny growl, and I saw at once that his nerves were raw like a woman's. As we turned into the deep-shadowed, spooky-black college roadway, the dormitories' yellow lights and laughter flared forth grotesquely like the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge cut up for a Jack-o'-Lantern. At the edge of the Lombardy poplars I heard Sagner swallowing a little bit overhard. "I suspect that I made rather a fool of myself back there," he confided abruptly, "but if there's anything under the day or night sky that makes me mad, it's the idiotic babble, babble, babble, these past few weeks about the 'dead wife's sister' law." "What's your grouch?" I asked. "You're not even a married man, let alone a widower."