celluloid-underwear lady, explaining by a hurried postal card that
they would 'remit' from Chicago, she evicted the other two boarders,
and retired again to private life.

This episode was only one of Mrs. Grubb's many divagations, for she
had been a person of advanced ideas from a comparatively early age.
It would seem that she must have inherited a certain number of
'views,' because no human being could have amassed, in a quarter of a
century, as many as she held at the age of twenty-five. She had then
stood up with Mr. Charles Grubb, before a large assembly, in the
presence of which they promised to assume and continue the relation
of husband and wife so long as it was mutually agreeable. As a
matter of fact it had not been mutually agreeable to Mr. Grubb more
than six months, but such was the nobility of his character that he
never disclosed his disappointment nor claimed any immunity from the
responsibilities of the marriage state. Mr. Grubb was a timid,
conventional soul, who would have given all the testimony of all the
witnesses of his wedding ceremony for the mere presence of a single
parson; but he imagined himself in love with Cora Wilkins, and she
could neither be wooed nor won by any of the beaten paths that led to
other women. He foolishly thought that the number of her convictions
would grow less after she became a wife, little suspecting the
fertility of her mind, which put forth a new explanation of the
universe every day, like a strawberry plant that devotes itself so
exclusively to 'runners' that it has little vigour left for producing
fruit.

The town in New York where they lived proving to be too small,
narrow, and bigoted to hold a developing soul like Mrs. Grubb's, she
persuaded her husband to take passage for California, where the