Nell Speed - Vacation with the Tucker Twins

Dum recited this poem with fervor and great elocutionary effects and simply convulsed the crowd. The whole thing was said directly to Mr. Gordon and the naughty girl seemed to have some personal meaning when she said, "My heart went hop, my heart went thump," and when she ended up with a hopeless wail, "I tried to turn the handle, but – ," Mr. Gordon actually went to Miss Cox, as we arose from the supper table, drew her hand within his arm and deliberately led her out on the beach, and in plain hearing of all of us, said:

"The door isn't shut for good, is it, Jinny?"

And we heard her answer: "No, Bob, not if you 'pull and push and kick and knock.'"

Well, Bob certainly did "pull and push and kick and knock." I have never imagined a more persistent lover. He seemed to be trying to catch even for all he had lost in those seventeen years. He told Zebedee that after the foolish quarrel he and Miss Cox had had on that wet, wet picnic, he had been called home by the financial disaster of his father, and while he knew he had been hard-headed in the affair, he felt she had been unreasonable, too, in demanding that he should agree with her about the absurd poem in Alice in Wonderland; and so had left the University without trying to right matters. Then when he had realized the tremendous difficulty his family was in, and found that not only would he have to go immediately to work but that his mother and sister would be dependent on his exertions, he felt that it was on the whole best that he and Miss Cox should separate. The engagement was already broken and he went off to his long and up-hill work saddened and forlorn; and Miss Cox, rather embittered by the experience, feeling that she had been hasty and exacting but too proud to make a move towards a reconciliation, had spent all the long years in vain regrets.

"Well, I hope they will be very happy," sighed Dum when we were discussing the matter while we lay on our closely packed cots the first night of Mr. Gordon's visit. "It does seem terribly unromantic for the separation to have been caused by the Lobster Quadrille."

"It might have been a permanent separation if it had been just plain lobster, 'specially in cans," said funny Mary Flannagan.

"Didn't Miss Cox look sweet in that blue dress? I thought she was almost pretty but maybe it was the love-light in her eyes," sentimentalized Annie Pore.

"Isn't it a pity they are so old?" deplored Dee. "His hair is real grey."

"It's trouble that has done it," said Mary. "I wondered, Dum, you didn't get off that verse on him about the voice of the lobster. Maybe that would have been too personal:

It would have been rather personal because Mr. Gordon's hair does look rather sugared and certainly Miss Cox has baked him pretty brown."

"What do you s'pose your Cousin Park Garnett would say, Page, if she knew that our chaperone for the house party had gone and got herself as good as engaged the very second evening?" laughed Dee.

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