us insisted one night in 1903 when
the two were eating supper in Barclay's private car on a side-track in
Arizona; "don't be like my wife--she always drools over that chapter,
too. But you know my wife--" Lycurgus always referred to Mrs. Mason
with a grand gesture as to his dog or his horse, which were especially
desirable chattels. "My wife,--it's just like a woman,--she sits and
reads that, and laughs and weeps, and giggles and sniffs, and I say,
'What's the matter with you, anyway?'"

John Barclay pushed a button. To the porter he said, "Bring me that
little red book in my satchel." The book had been published but a few
weeks, and John always carried a copy around with him in those days to
give to a friend. When the porter brought the book, Barclay read
aloud, "Ah, truly hath the poet said, 'Marriages are made in heaven.'"

But Lycurgus Mason pulled his napkin from under his chin and moved
back from the table, dusting the crumbs from his obviously Sunday
clothes. "There you go--that's it; 'as the poet says.' John, if you
heard that 'as the poet says' as often as I do--" He could not finish
the figure. But he sniffed out his disgust with "as the poet says."
"It wasn't so bad when we were in the hotel, and she was busy with
something else. But now--but now--" he repeated it the third time,
"but now--honest, every time that woman goes to get up a paper for
the Hypatia Club, she gets me in the parlour, and rehearses it to me,
and the dad-binged thing is simply packed full of 'as the poet
sayses.' And about that marriages being made in heaven, I tell my wife
this: I say, 'Maybe so, but if they are, I know one that was made on a
busy day when the angels were thinking of something else.'"

And John Barclay, who knew Mrs. Mason and knew Lycurgus, knew that he
would as soon think of throwing a bomb at the President as to say such
a thing to her; so John asked credulously: "You did? Well, well! Say,
what did she say to that?"

"That's it--" responded Lycurgus. "That's it. What could she say? I
had her." He walked the length of the room proudly, with his hands
thrust into his pockets.

Barclay moved his chair to the rear of the car, where he sat smoking
and looking into the clear star-lit heavens above the desert. And his
mind went back thirty years to the twilight in June after he had set
off the powder keg in the culvert under Main Street in Sycamore Ridge,
and he tried to remember how Jane Mason got over from Minneola--