Not only in cheap plays and farces do people continue in perplexities
that one question and one answer would put an end to. In real life we
incessantly dread to ask the answers to conundrums that we cannot
solve, and persist in misery for lack of a little frankness.

For many a smiling mile, on the morrow, Davidge rode in a torment. So
stout a man, to be fretted by so little a matter! Yet he was unable to
bring himself to the point of solving his curiosity. The car had
covered forty miles, perhaps, while his thoughts ran back and forth,
lacing the road like a dog accompanying a carriage. A mental
speedometer would have run up a hundred miles before he made the
plunge and popped the subject.

"Mamise is an unusual name," he remarked.

Marie Louise was pleasantly startled by the realization that his long
silence had been devoted to her.

"Like it?" she asked.

"You bet." The youthfulness of this embarrassed him and made her
laugh. He grew solemn for about eleven hundred yards of road that went
up and down and up and down in huge billows. Then he broke out again:

"It's an unusual name."

She laughed patiently. "So I've heard."

The road shot up a swirling hill into an old, cool grove.

"I only knew one other--er--Mamise."

This sobered her. It was unpleasant not to be unique. The chill woods
seemed to be rather glum about it, too. The road abandoned them and
flung into a sun-bathed plain.

"Really? You really knew another--er--Mamise?"

"Yes. Years ago."

"Was she nice?"

"Very."

"Oh!" She was sorry about that, too. The road slipped across a
loose-planked, bone-racking bridge. With some jealousy she asked,
"What was she like?"

"You."

"That's odd." A little shabby, topply-tombed graveyard glided by,
reverting to oblivion. "Tell me about her."

A big motor charged past so fast that the passengers were only blurs,
a grim chauffeur-effect with blobs of fat womankind trailing snapping
veils. The car trailed a long streamer of dust that tasted of the
road. When this was penetrated they entered upon a stretch of pleasant
travel for eyes and wheels, on a long, long channel through a fruitful
prairie, a very allegory of placid opulence.

"It was funny," said Davidge. "I was younger than I am. I went to a
show one night. A musical team played that everlasting 'Poet and
Peasant' on the xylophones. They played nearly everything on nearly
everything--same old stuff, accordions, horns, bells; same old jo