Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/158

Rh Seems he used to get terribly sad as soon as he was left alone with a girl and began to hint about a tragedy in his past—something that had blighted his whole life and left him without the power to love again—and lots more slop from the same pail.

Of course, every girl in that town had known Chauncey since he wore short pants, and ought to have known that the nearest to a tragedy he had ever been was when he sat in the top gallery of a Chicago theatre and saw a lot of barnstormers play Othello. But some people, and especially very young people, don't think anything's worth believing unless it's hard to believe.

Chauncey worked along these lines until he was twenty-four, and then he made a mistake. Most of the girls that he had grown up with had married off, and while he was waiting for a new lot to come along, he began to shine up to the widow Sharpless, a powerful, well-preserved woman of forty or thereabouts, who had been born with her