wake up at night parched with thirst, ten thousand matches to the
bad. But banking is a wild life and everybody knows it.

Sometimes Pupkin would swear off and keep away from the cursed thing
for weeks, and then perhaps he'd see by sheer accident a pile of
matches on the table, or a match lying on the floor and it would
start the craze in him. I am using his own words--a "craze"--that's
what he called it when he told Miss Lawson all about it, and she
promised to cure him of it. She would have, too. Only, as I say,
Pupkin found that what he had mistaken for attraction was only
respect. And there's no use worrying a woman that you respect about
your crazes.


It was from Mallory Tompkins that Pupkin learned all about the
Mariposa people, because Pupkin came from away off--somewhere down in
the Maritime Provinces--and didn't know a soul. Mallory Tompkins used
to tell him about Judge Pepperleigh, and what a wonderfully clever
man he was and how he would have been in the Supreme Court for
certain if the Conservative Government had stayed in another fifteen
or twenty years instead of coming to a premature end. He used to talk
so much about the Pepperleighs, that Pupkin was sick of the very
name. But just as soon as he had seen Zena Pepperleigh he couldn't
hear enough of them. He would have talked with Tompkins for hours
about the judge's dog Rover. And as for Zena, if he could have
brought her name over his lips, he would have talked of her forever.

He first saw her--by one of the strangest coincidences in the
world--on the Main Street of Mariposa. If he hadn't happened to be
going up the street and she to be coming down it, the thing wouldn't