make a better wife!" was Alix's conclusion. She gave them spirited
accounts of Anne's affair. "He's a nice little academic fellow,"
she said of Justin Little. "If he had a flatiron in each hand he'd
probably weigh close to a hundred pounds! He's a--well, a sort of
DAMP-LOOKING youth, if you know what I mean! I always want to take
a crash towel and dry him off!"

"Fancy Anne with a shrimp like that!" Cherry said, with a proud
look at her own man's fine height.

"Anne was delicious!" Alix further revealed. "They used to take
dignified walks on Sundays. I used to tease her, and she'd get so
mad she'd ask Dad to ask me to be more refined. She said that Mr.
Little was a most unusual man, and it was belittling to his
dignity to have me suppose that a man and a woman couldn't have an
intellectual friendship. This in May, my dear, and after the thing
was settled and Anne had cried, and written notes, and Justin had
gone to Dad and asked where he could buy a second-hand revolver--"

"Oh, Alexandra Strickland, you're making up!" Cherry went back
naturally to the old nursery phrase.

"Honestly--cross my heart!" Alix assured her. "That's the way they
managed it; they solemnly discussed it and worked it out on paper,
and Justin's mother called on Anne--she's an awful old girl, too,
she looks like a totem pole--and Anne called on his aunts, and
then he asked Dad, 'as Anne's male relative,' he said, and it was
all settled. And THEN--THEN Anne became the mushiest thing I ever
saw! And not only mushy, Cherry, but proudly and openly mushy.
She'd catch Justin's hand up, at the table, and say 'Frenny--'"