So I think that if you know Mariposa and understand even the
rudiments of banking, you are perfectly acquainted with Mr. Pupkin.
What? You remember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high
school teacher? In love with HER? What a ridiculous idea. You mean
merely because on the night when the Mariposa Belle sank with every
soul on board, Pupkin put off from the town in a skiff to rescue
Miss Lawson. Oh, but you're quite wrong. That wasn't LOVE. I've
heard Pupkin explain it himself a dozen times. That sort of
thing,--paddling out to a sinking steamer at night in a crazy
skiff,--may indicate a sort of attraction, but not real love, not
what Pupkin came to feel afterwards. Indeed, when he began to think
of it, it wasn't even attraction, it was merely respect,--that's all
it was. And anyway, that was long before, six or seven months back,
and Pupkin admitted that at the time he was a mere boy.


Mr. Pupkin, I must explain, lived with Mallory Tompkins in rooms over
the Exchange Bank, on the very top floor, the third, with Mullins's
own rooms below them. Extremely comfortable quarters they were, with
two bedrooms and a sitting-room that was all fixed up with snowshoes
and tennis rackets on the walls and dance programmes and canoe club
badges and all that sort of thing.

Mallory Tompkins was a young man with long legs and check trousers
who worked on the Mariposa Times-Herald. That was what gave him his
literary taste. He used to read Ibsen and that other Dutch
author--Bumstone Bumstone, isn't it?--and you can judge that he was a
mighty intellectual fellow. He was so intellectual that he was, as he
himself admitted, a complete eggnostic. He and Pupkin used to have
the most tremendous arguments about creation and evolution, and how