society and a policeman. Incidentally, it involved a pearl collar
and a box of soap, which sounds incongruous, doesn't it?

It is a great misfortune to be stout, especially for a man. Jim
was rotund and looked shorter than he really was, and as all the
lines of his face, or what should have been lines, were really
dimples, his face was about as flexible and full of expression as
a pillow in a tight cover. The angrier he got the funnier he
looked, and when he was raging, and his neck swelled up over his
collar and got red, he was entrancing. And everybody liked him,
and borrowed money from him, and laughed at his pictures (he has
one in the Hargrave gallery in London now, so people buy them
instead), and smoked his cigarettes, and tried to steal his Jap.
The whole story hinges on the Jap.

The trouble was, I think, that no one took Jim seriously. His
ambition in life was to be taken seriously, but people steadily
refused to. His art was a huge joke--except to himself. If he
asked people to dinner, every one expected a frolic. When he
married Bella Knowles, people chuckled at the wedding, and
considered it the wildest prank of Jimmy's career, although Jim
himself seemed to take it awfully hard.

We had all known them both for years. I went to Farmington with
Bella, and Anne Brown was her matron of honor when she married
Jim. My first winter out, Jimmy had paid me a lot of attention.
He painted my portrait in oils and had a studio tea to exhibit
it. It was a very nice picture, but it did not look like me, so I
stayed away from the exhibition. Jim asked me to. He said he was
not a photographer, and that anyhow the rest of my features