a few new faces. Sure you can listen! Though, bless your heart, we
weren't talking about anything so very specially interesting," he
explained conscientiously. "You see, I was merely arguing with my
young friend here that if a woman really loves you, she'll follow you
through any kind of blame or disgrace--follow you anywheres, I
said--anywheres!"

"Not anywheres," protested the Young Electrician with a grin. "'Not up
a telegraph pole!'" he requoted sheepishly.

"Y-e-s--I heard that," acknowledged the Youngish Girl with blithe
shamelessness.

"Follow you '_anywheres_,' was what I said," persisted the Traveling
Salesman almost irritably. "Follow you '_anywheres_'! Run! Walk! Crawl
on her hands and knees if it's really necessary. And yet--" Like a
shaggy brown line drawn across the bottom of a column of figures, his
eyebrows narrowed to their final calculation. "And yet--" he estimated
cautiously, "and yet--there's times when I ain't so almighty sure
that her following you is any more specially flattering to you than if
you was a burglar. She don't follow you so much, I reckon, because you
_are_ her love as because you've _got_ her love. God knows it ain't
just you, yourself, she's afraid of losing. It's what she's already
invested in you that's worrying her! All her pinky-posy, cunning
kid-dreams about loving and marrying, maybe; and the pretty-much
grown-up winter she fought out the whisky question with you, perhaps;
and the summer you had the typhoid, likelier than not; and the spring
the youngster was born--oh, sure, the spring the youngster was born!
Gee! If by swallowing just one more yarn you tell her, she can only
keep on holding down all the old yarns you ever told her--if, by