Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/43

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cover and the gasoline stove and the golden oak furniture—all prospective, but just like that, she knew very well—and drifting away from Bill, lured on by the "festive dance, the rich, the gay," so different, indeed, from their home.

The picture brought comfortable tears, which crawled down beside her nose with a tickling, itchy feeling, making her sniff like a rabbit, and wipe them along her bare arm.

There was another song, sadder for the picture of consummate wreckage in the lives of herself and Bill. It was called We Never Speak As We Pass By. That was her favored one, reserved for rainy days.

And then the tempter came to Nell,
He dazzled her, alas, she fell!

It was terribly sad and sweet. The tempter came to Nell, and Goosie was Nell, in the little home in Argentine. And Earl Gray, the druggist, was the tempter. Earl Gray was not the druggist of McPacken when Goosie imagined him as the evil tempter of the song, but a grander Earl Gray, dressed in a long black coat and stove-pipe hat, like the man in the New York Weekly who was tempting Constance. The Pretty Sewing Girl. She cast Earl for the part on account of his long, wavy hair.

Goosie knew that a tempter in her home would not last as long as it would take to cook an egg, with Bill coming in from his run. Bill would slam him against the wall so hard he'd knock the stove-pipe down, and