her in pink, and that on two separate occasions had insisted on her dog
eating the leg of a chicken instead of the breast; but Time, the great
healer, seemed to have removed all bitterness, and she greeted him
affectionately.
'Wassums going to win great big championship against nasty rough strong
man?' she said.
'Such,' said Vincent Jopp, 'is my intention. It was kind of you,
Luella, to trouble to come and watch me. I wonder if you know Mrs.
Agnes Parsons Jopp?' he said, courteously, indicating a kind-looking,
motherly woman who had just come up. 'How are you, Agnes?'
'If you had asked me that question this morning, Vincent,' replied Mrs.
Agnes Parsons Jopp, 'I should have been obliged to say that I felt far
from well. I had an odd throbbing feeling in the left elbow, and I am
sure my temperature was above the normal. But this afternoon I am a
little better. How are you, Vincent?'
Although she had, as I recalled from the reports of the case, been
compelled some years earlier to request the Court to sever her marital
relations with Vincent Jopp on the ground of calculated and inhuman
brutality, in that he had callously refused, in spite of her pleadings,
to take old Dr. Bennett's Tonic Swamp-Juice three times a day, her
voice, as she spoke, was kind and even anxious. Badly as this man had
treated her--and I remember hearing that several of the jury had been
unable to restrain their tears when she was in the witness-box giving
her evidence--there still seemed to linger some remnants of the old
affection.
'I am quite well, thank you, Agnes,' said Vincent Jopp.
'Are you wearing your liver-pad?'
A frown flitted across my employer's strong face.
'I am not wearing my liver-pad,' he replied, brusquely.
'Oh, Vincent, how rash of you!'
He was about to speak, when a sudden exclamation from his rear checked
him. A genial-looking woman in a sports coat was standing there, eyeing
him with a sort of humorous horror.
'Well, Jane,' he said.
I gathered that this was Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp, the wife who had
divorced him for systematic and ingrowing fiendishness on the ground
that he had repeatedly outraged her feelings by wearing a white
waistcoat with a dinner-jacket. She continued to look at him dumbly,
and then uttered a sort of strangled, hysterical laugh.
'Those legs!' she cried. 'Those legs!'
Vincent Jopp flushed darkly. Even the strongest and most silent of us
have our weaknesses, and my employer's was the rooted idea that he
looked well in knickerbockers. It was not my place to try to dissuade
him, but there was no doubt that they did not suit him. Nature, in
bestowing upon him a massive head and a jutting chin, had forgotten to
finish him off at the other end. Vincent Jopp's legs were skinny.
'You poor dear man!' went on Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp. 'What practical
joker ever lured you into appearing in public in knickerbockers?'
'I don't object to the knickerbockers,' said Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp,
