Page:Earl Derr Biggers - Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913).djvu/133

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THE SUMMER CROWD
115

He was a splendid man, but there's no denying that in the years we were married he sometimes forgot what he started out to do. I always brought him up sharp. 'Your great desire,' I told him, 'is to make me happy. I'd keep on the job if I was you! And he did, to the day of his death. A perfectly lovely man, though careless in money matters. If he hadn't had that failing I wouldn't be—"

Miss Norton, her cheeks flushed, broke in hurriedly.

"Mamma, these gentlemen can't be at all inter ested." Deftly she turned the conversation to generalities.

Mr. Peters at last seated the winter guests of Baldpate Inn, and opened his luncheon with a soup which he claimed to have wrested from a can. This news drew from Professor Bolton a learned discourse on the tinned aids to the hermit of to-day. He pictured the seeker for solitude setting out for a desert isle, with canned foods for his body and canned music for his soul. "Rob inson Crusoe," he said, "should be rewritten with a can-opener in the leading rôle." Mrs.