Billy had no comment on that. Joe’s abilities might irritate him a little, but he was usually respectful of the older man’s opinion.

We watched the little wood curls flare in the fire.

8.

As to J. M. Chittim, my rueful conclusion was that he had become the first martyr to dime novels. I might have been going crazy, but Chittim stopped on the sidewalk and died—and who can say that it wasn’t because he hated to walk in, for perhaps the hundredth time, and tell me, No sir, very sorry sir, no sign of the new Mustang Merle this morning?

I can’t say it, and he was my butler. For a time I stopped feeling crazed and just felt guilty.

Now you might suppose that since my butler died as the result of my mania, my family must have suffered agonies just as acute, if not as final.

Not a bit of it! No happier bunch of females than Dora and those girls resided on Chestnut Street—or in the whole of Philadelphia, for that matter. There they were, and there they flourished, ten firm impediments to the freedom of the imagination, and to most other freedoms as well.

I include Dora in the account, for Dora and the girls differed only in degree. In kind they were as alike as ten turnips, and could have been no more indifferent to the doings—much less the feelings—of dear old Dad. The larger girls concerned themselves mainly with beaus and tea dances, while the smaller ones made do with birthday parties and ponies.

No, the Sippy girls were fine; popular all over town and happy as peaches.

And Dora? I suppose Dora was happier still, if it’s possible to be happier than a peach. Dora had Society, a source of complete happiness to a woman of her leanings.

Billy Bone seemed to feel he knew all about Society.

“I saw a picture of it in a newspaper once,” he informed us.

Joe Lovelady was interested in Dora. “Did your wife ask a lot of questions?” he inquired.

Is water wet? I might have replied. Dora was never one to suppress a question. She didn’t suppress the hard ones, or the easy ones either.

“Why are you lying on top of me, breathing in my face?” I remember her asking, early on.

“Oh,” I said, and got off. Of course I didn’t mention that one to the boys.

Over the years, Dora modified that question a bit. “Why are you still breathing, no more than you do?” she asked, a few days before I left home.

I mentioned that one to Joe and Billy—I was just trying to be humorous about the little vagaries of married life—but Billy flared up at the thought that any woman would ask a man such a question.