Mother and I made it up setting on a bench.
“Listen, Charley,” she said. “This is our Golden Honeymoon and we
don’t want the whole thing spoilt with a silly old quarrel.”
“Well,” I said, “did you mean that about wishing you had married
Hartsell?”
“Of course not,” she said, “that is, if you didn’t mean that you
wished I had, too.”
So I said:
“I was just tired and all wrought up. I thank God you chose me
instead of him as they’s no other woman in the world who I could of
lived with all these years.”
“How about Mrs. Hartsell?” says Mother.
“Good gracious!” I said. “Imagine being married to a woman that plays
five hundred like she does and drops her teeth on the roque court!”
“Well,” said Mother, “it wouldn’t be no worse than being married to a
man that expectorates towards ladies and is such a fool in a checker
game.”
So I put my arm around her shoulder and she stroked my hand and I
guess we got kind of spooney.
They was two days left of our stay in St. Petersburg and the next to
the last day Mother introduced me to a Mrs. Kendall from Kingston,
Rhode Island, who she had met at the chiropodist’s.
Mrs. Kendall made us acquainted with her husband, who is in the
grocery business. They have got two sons and five grandchildren and
one great-grandchild. One of their sons lives in Providence and is
way up in the Elks as well as a Rotarian.
We found them very congenial people and we played cards with them the
last two nights we was there. They was both experts and I only wished
we had met them sooner instead of running into the Hartsells. But
the Kendalls will be there again next winter and we will see more of
them, that is, if we decide to make the trip again.
We left the Sunshine City on the eleventh day of February, at 11
A. M. This give us a day trip through Florida and we seen all the
country we had passed through at night on the way down.
We reached Jacksonville at 7 P. M. and pulled out of there at 8.10
P. M. We reached Fayetteville, North Carolina, at nine o’clock the
following morning, and reached Washington, D. C., at 6.30 P. M.,
laying over there half an hour.
We reached Trenton at 11.01 P. M. and had wired ahead to my daughter
and son-in-law and they met us at the train and we went to their
house and they put us up for the night. John would of made us stay up
all night, telling about our trip, but Edie said we must be tired and
made us go to bed. That’s my daughter.
The next day we took our train for home and arrived safe and sound,
having been gone just one month and a day.
Here comes Mother, so I guess I better shut up.
[17] Copyright, 1922, by The International Magazine
Company (Cosmopolitan).
Copyright, 1923, by Ring W. Lardner.