k the form of
Theobald's telephone message to the Ritz reminding me of our dinner
engagement. It was an awful dinner, for intuitively I knew what was
coming, and quite as intuitively he knew what was coming, and even the
waiter knew when it came,--for I flung Theobald's ring right against his
stately German chest. There'd be no good in telling you, Matilda Anne,
what led up to that most unlady-like action. I don't intend to burn
incense in front of myself. It may have looked wrong. But I know you'll
take my word when I say he deserved it. The one thing that hurts is
that he had the triumph of being the first to sever diplomatic
relations. In the language of Shorty McCabe and my fellow countrymen,
_he threw me down!_ Twenty minutes later, after composing my soul and
powdering my nose, I was telephoning all over the city trying to find
Duncan. I got him at last, and he came to the Ritz on the run. Then we
picked up a residuary old horse-hansom on Fifth Avenue and went rattling
off through Central Park. There I--who once boasted of seven proposals
and three times that number of nibbles--promptly and shamelessly
proposed to my Dinky-Dunk, though he is too much of a gentleman not to
swear it's a horrid lie and that he'd have fought through an acre of
Greek fire to get me!

But whatever happened, Count Theobald Gustav Von Guntner threw me down,
and Dinky-Dunk caught me on the bounce, and now instead of going to
embassy balls and talking world-politics like a Mrs. Humphry Ward
heroine I've married a shack-owner who grows wheat up in the Canadian
Northwest. And instead of wearing a tiara in the Grand Tier at the
Metropolitan I'm up here a dot on the prairie and wearing an apron made
of butcher's linen! _Sursum corda!_ For I'm still in the ring. And it's
no easy thing to fall in love and land on your feet. But I've gone and
done it. I've taken the high jump. I've made my bed, as Uncle Carlton
had the nerve to tell me, and now I've got to lie in it. But _assez
d'Etrangers_!

That wedding-day of mine I'll always remember as a day of smells, the
smell of the pew-cushions in the empty church, the smell of the
lilies-of-the-valley, that dear, sweet, scatter-brained
Fanny-Rain-In-The-Face (she rushed to town an hour after getting my
wire) insisted on carrying, the smell of the leather in the damp taxi,
the tobaccoy smell of Dinky-Dunk's quite impossible best man, who'd been
picked up at the hotel, on the fly, to act as a witness, an