e back with a copy of a petition for divorce that had been
entered by John Markley, alleging desertion. John Markley did not face
the town when he brought his suit, but left for Chicago on the
afternoon train, and was gone nearly a month. The broken little woman
did not come back to contest the case, and the divorce was granted.

The day before his marriage to Isabel Hobart, John Markley shaved off
his grizzled brown beard, and showed the town a face so strong and
cunning and brutal that men were shocked; they said that she wished to
make him appear young, and the shave did drop ten years from his
countenance; but it uncovered his soul so shamelessly that it seemed
immodest to look at his face. Upon the return from the wedding trip, the
employees of the Markley Mortgage Company, at John Markley's suggestion,
gave a reception for the bride and groom, and the Lord laid the first
visible stripe on John Markley while he stood with his bride for three
hours, waiting for the thousand invited guests who never came.
"Alphabetical" Morrison, who owed John Markley money, and had to go,
told us in the office the next day that John Markley in evening clothes,
with his great paunch swathed in a white silk vest, smirking like a
gorged jackal, showing his fellow-townsmen for the first time his
coarse, yellow teeth and his thin, cruel lips, looked like some horrible
cartoon of his former self. Colonel Morrison did not describe the bride,
but she passed our office that day, going the rounds of the dry-goods
stores, giggling with the men clerks--a picture of sin that made men wet
their lips. She was big, oversexed, and feline; rattling in silks, with
an aura of sensuousness around her which seemed to glow like a coal,
without a flicker of kindness or shame or sweetness, and which all the
town knew instinctively must clinker into something black and ugly as
the years went by.

So the threshold of the cottage on Exchange Street was not darkened by
our people. And when the big house went up--a palace for a country town,
though it only cost John Markley $25,000--he, who had been so reticent
about his affairs in other years, tried to talk to his old friends of
the house, telling them expansively that he was putting it up so that
the town would have something in the way of a house for public
gatherings; but he aroused no responsive enthusiasm, and long before the
big opening reception his fervour had been quenched. Though we are a
curious peo