smitten by her and wrote her letters, trying to get her to creep out with them at night. You know how such things are done. The letters were unsigned. "You go to such and such a place on Friday evening. If you are willing to talk things over with me carry a book in your hand."
Then the woman made a mistake and told her husband about the receipt of one of the letters, and he grew angry and tramped off to the trysting place at night with a shotgun in his hand. When no one appeared he came home and fussed about. He said little mean tentative things. "You must have looked in a certain way at the man when you passed him on the street. A man don't grow so bold with a married woman unless an opening has been given him."
The man talked and talked after that and life in the house must not have been gay. She grew habitually silent and when she was silent the house was silent. They had no children.
Then the man Edgar Wilson came along going eastward and stopped over in the town for two or three days. He had at that time a little money and stayed at a small workingmen's boardinghouse near the railroad station. One day he saw the woman walking in the street and followed her to her home and the neighbours saw them standing and talking together for an hour by the front gate. On the next day he came again.
That time they talked for two hours and then she went into the house, got a few belongings, and walked to the railroad station with him. They took a train for Chicago and lived here together apparently very happy, until she died—in a way I am about to try to tell you about. They of course could not be married, and during the three years they lived here he did nothing toward earning their common living. As he had a very small amount of money when they came, barely enough to get them here from the Kansas town, they were miserably poor.
They lived, when I knew about them, over on the North Side, in that section of old three and four story brick residences that were once the homes of what we call our nice people, but that had afterwards gone to the bad. The section is having a kind of rebirth
now, but for a good many years it rather went to seed. There were these old residences, made into boarding-houses, and with unbelievably dirty lace curtains at the windows, and now and then an
