scintillating? I know that my hands were always cold,
and my cheeks were always hot, those days.

He wrote like a modern Demosthenes, with
all political New York to quiver under his philippics.
The managing editor used to send him out on wonderful
assignments, and they used to hold the paper for his
stuff when it was late. Sometimes he would be gone for
days at a time, and when he returned the men would look
at him with a sort of admiring awe. And the city editor
would glance up from beneath his green eye-shade and call
out:

"Say, Orme, for a man who has just wired in about a
million dollars' worth of stuff seems to me you don't
look very crisp and jaunty."

"Haven't slept for a week," Peter Orme would growl,
and then he would brush past the men who were crowded
around him, and turn in my direction. And the old
hot-and-cold, happy, frightened, laughing, sobbing
sensation would have me by the throat again.

Well, we were married. Love cast a glamour over his
very vices. His love of drink? A weakness which I would
transform into strength. His white hot flashes of
uncontrollable temper? Surely they would die down at my
cool, tender touch. His fits of abstraction and
irritability? Mere evidences of the genius within. Oh,
my worshiping soul was always alert with an excuse.