d cell. For you
were the one who was closest to me in the old days, Matilda Anne, and
when I was in trouble you were always the staff on which I leaned, the
calm-eyed Tillie-on-the-spot who never seemed to fail me! And I think
you will understand.

But there's so much to talk about I scarcely know where to begin. The
funny part of it all is, I've gone and married the _Other Man_. And you
won't understand that a bit, unless I start at the beginning. But when I
look back, there doesn't seem to be any beginning, for it's only in
books that things really begin and end in a single lifetime.

Howsomever, as Chinkie used to say, when I left you and Scheming Jack in
that funny little stone house of yours in Corfu, and got to Palermo, I
found Lady Agatha and Chinkie there at the Hotel des Palmes and the
yacht being coaled from a tramp steamer's bunkers in the harbor. So I
went on with them to Monte Carlo. We had a terrible trip all the way up
to the Riviera, and I was terribly sea-sick, and those lady novelists
who love to get their heroines off on a private yacht never dream that
in anything but duckpond weather the ordinary yacht at sea is about the
meanest habitation between Heaven and earth. But it was at Monte Carlo I
got the cable from Uncle Carlton telling me the Chilean revolution had
wiped out our nitrate mine concessions and that your poor Tabby's last
little nest-egg had been smashed. In other words, I woke up and found
myself a beggar, and for a few hours I even thought I'd have to travel
home on that Monte Carlo Viaticum fund which so discreetly ships away
the stranded adventurer before he musses up the Mediterranean scenery by
shooting himself. Then I remembered my letter of credit, and firmly but
sorrowfully paid off poor Hortense, who through her tears proclaimed
that she'd go with me anywhere, and without any thought of wages
(imagine being hooked up by a maid to whom you were under such
democratizing obligations!) But I was firm, for I knew the situation,
might just as well be faced first as last.

So I counted up my letter of credit and found I had exactly six hundred
and seventy-one dollars, American money, between me and beggary. Then I
sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was
code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates
all the while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxes duly piled up in
tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the