Out of the bathtub, rubicund and rotund, stepped Mr. Ambrose Pottle. He anointed his hair with sweet spirits of lilac and dusted his anatomy with crushed rosebud talcum. He donned a virgin union suit; a pair of socks, silk where it showed; ultra low shoes; white-flannel trousers, warm from the tailor’s goose; a creamy silk shirt; an impeccable blue coat; a gala tie, perfect after five tyings; and then went forth into the spring-scented eventide to pay a call on Mrs. Blossom Gallup.
He approached her new-art bungalow as one might a shrine, with diffident steps and hesitant heart, but with delicious tinglings radiating from his spinal cord. Only the ballast of a three-pound box of Choc-O-late Nutties under his arm kept him on earth. He was in love.
To be in love for the first time at twenty is passably thrilling; but to be in love for the first time at thirty-six is exquisitely excruciating.
Mr. Pottle found Mrs. Gallup in her living room, a basket of undarned stockings on her lap. With a pretty show of confusion and many embarrassed murmurings she thrust them behind the piano, he protesting that this intimate domesticity delighted him.
She sank back with a little sigh into a gay-chintzed wicker chair, and the rosy light from a tall piano lamp fell gently on her high-piled golden hair, her surprised blue eyes, and the ripe, generous outlines of her figure. To Mr. Pottle she was a dream of loveliness, a poem, an idyl. He would have given worlds, solar systems to have been able to tell her so. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t find the words, for, like many another sterling character in the barbers’ supply business, he was not eloquent; he did not speak with the fluent ease, the masterful flow that comes, one sees it often said, from twenty-one minutes a day of communion with the great minds of all time. His communings had been largely with boss barbers; with them he was cheery and chatty. But Mrs. Gallup and her intellectual interests were a world removed from things tonsorial; in her presence he was tongue-tied as an oyster.
Mr. Pottle’s worshiping eye roved from the lady to her library, and his good-hearted face showed tiny furrows of despair; an array of fat crisp books in shiny new bindings stared at him: Twenty-one Minutes’ Daily Communion With the Master Minds; Capsule Chats on Poets, Philosophers, Painters, Novelists, Interior Decorators; Culture for the Busy Man, six volumes, half calf; How to Build Up a Background; Talk Tips; YOU, Too, Can Be Interesting; Sixty Square Feet of Self-Culture–and a score more. “Culture”–always that wretched word!
“Are you fond of reading, Mr. Pottle?” asked Mrs. Gallup, popping a Choc-O-late Nuttie into her demure mouth with a daintiness almost ethereal.
“Love it,” he answered promptly.
“Who is your favorite poet?”
“S-Shakspere,” he ventured desperately.
“He’s mine, too.” Mr. Pottle breathed easier.
“But,” she added, “I think Longfellow is sweet, don’t you?”
“Very sweet,” agreed Mr. Pottle.
She smiled at him with a sad, shy confidence.
“He did not understand,” she said.
She nodded her blonde head toward an enlarged picture of the late Mr. Gallup, in the full regalia of Past Grand Master of the Beneficent Order of Beavers.
“Didn’t he care for–er–literature?” asked Mr. Pottle.
“He despised it,” she replied. “He was wrapped up in the hay-and-feed business. He began to talk about oats and chicken gravel on our honeymoon.”
Mr. Pottle made a sympathetic noise.
“In our six years of married life,” she went on, “he talked of nothing but duck fodder, carload lots, trade discounts, selling points, bran, turnover
