terrible tension to the delivery of the mail, morning and afternoon, fell then into a miasmic swamp when no word came, July ended. The summer waned. She did not write.
Upon the darkening porch, awaiting food, the boarders rocked, oh rocked with laughter.
The boarders said: “Eugene’s lost his girl. He doesn’t know what to do, he’s lost his girl.”
“Well, well! Did the Old Boy lose his girl?”
The little fat girl, the daughter of one of the two fat sisters whose husbands were hotel clerks in Charleston, skipped to and from him, in slow May dance, with fat calves twinkling brownly above her socks.
“Lost his girl! Lost his girl! Eugene, Eugene, has lost his girl.”
The fat little girl skipped back to her fat mother for approbation: they regarded each other with complacent smiles loosely netted in their full-meated mouths.
“Don’t let them kid you, big boy. What’s the matter: did some one get your girl?” asked Mr. Hake, the flour salesman. He was a dapper young man of twenty-six years, who smoked large cigars; he had a tapering face, and a high domey head, bald on top, fringed sparsely with fine blond hair. His mother, a large grass-widow near fifty, with the powerful craggy face of an Indian, a large mass of dyed yellow hair, and a coarse smile, full of gold and heartiness, rocked mightily, laughing with hoarse compassion:
“Git another girl,’Gene. Why, law! I’d not let it bother me two minutes.” He always expected her to spit, emphatically, with gusto, after speaking.
“You should worry, boy. You should WORRY!” said Mr. Farrel, of Miami, the dancing instructor. “Women are like street-cars: if you miss one, there’s another along in fifteen minutes. Ain’t that right, lady?” he said pertly, turning to Miss Clark, of Valdosta, Georgia, for whom it had been uttered. She answered with a throaty confused twiddle-giggle of laughter. “Oh, aren’t men the awfullest—”
Leaning upon the porch rail in the thickening dusk, Mr. Jake
