Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/321

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THE PINK SASH

NO man could have asked the ques tion more simply. The whole gaunt, gigantic Rocky Mountain landscape seemed indeed most pe- culiarly conducive to simple emo' tions.

Yet Donas Guthrie s original remark had been purely whimsical and distinctly apropos of nothing at all. The careless knocking of his pipe against the piazza's primitive railing had certainly not pre pared the way for any particularly vital statement. "Up - - to - - the - - time - - he's - - thirty," drawled the pleasant, deep, distinctly masculine voice, "up to the time he's thirty, no man has done the things that he's really wanted to do but only the things that happened to come his way. He's forced into business to please his father, and cajoled into the Episcopal Church to gratify his mother, and bullied into red neckties to pacify his sister Isabel. But once having reached the grown up, level-headed, utterly independent age of thirty,

a man's a fool, I tell you, who does n't sit down de-

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