paper, with dynamite sparks flying from his spectacles as he
sentenced the Czar of Russia to ten years in the salt mines--and made
it fifteen a few minutes afterwards. Pepperleigh always read the
foreign news--the news of things that he couldn't alter--as a form of
wild and stimulating torment.

So you can imagine that in some ways the judge's house was a pretty
difficult house to go to. I mean you can see how awfully hard it must
have been for Mr. Pupkin. I tell you it took some nerve to step up
on that piazza and say, in a perfectly natural, off-hand way: "Oh,
how do you do, judge? Is Miss Zena in? No, I won't stay, thanks; I
think I ought to be going. I simply called." A man who can do that
has got to have a pretty fair amount of savoir what do you call it,
and he's got to be mighty well shaved and have his cameo pin put in
his tie at a pretty undeniable angle before he can tackle it. Yes,
and even then he may need to hang round behind the lilac bushes for
half an hour first, and cool off. And he's apt to make pretty good
time down Oneida Street on the way back.

Still, that's what you call love, and if you've got it, and are well
shaved, and your boots well blacked, you can do things that seem
almost impossible. Yes, you can do anything, even if you do trip over
the dog in getting off the piazza.

Don't suppose for a moment that Judge Pepperleigh was an
unapproachable or a harsh man always and to everybody. Even Mr.
Pupkin had to admit that that couldn't be so. To know that, you had
only to see Zena Pepperleigh put her arm round his neck and call him
Daddy. She would do that even when there were two or three young men
sitting on the edge of the piazza. You know, I think, the way they