He opened the door in the twilight. His face looked like a pumpkin pie.

“Well, I’ll say a fond farewell. Cruel fate may part us, but I will never love another. Never.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about cruel fate in eight yards of apricot silk and more metal pound for pound than a galley slave and the sole owner and proprietor of the unchallenged peripatetic john of the late Confederacy.” Then he told me how she had gone to the proctor to have him moved out and how the proctor had revealed enough low stubbornness to insist on consulting Shreve first. Then she suggested that he send for Shreve right off and do it, and he wouldnt do that, so after that she was hardly civil to Shreve.