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Then my ward run me for the Municipal Council, and I was elected by twenty-two votes to four over Grevsmuhl; and I can tell you it made me feel a mighty proud man to be honored like that and placed so high; and if my head didn’t swell I guess my heart did, to almost bursting, at such a rise in life, and one so unexpected and undreamed of. It hardly seemed it could be me the police touched their caps to, or the consuls confabbed with about local affairs as they dropped in to buy a toothbrush or a pair of socks–me who had landed there so short a time before in my pajamas and kind of dazed at the size and noise of the place after the silence of the Line–just common old me, with earrings in my ears and gaping like a Rube.

It meant a big uplift to me in every kind of a way, and I was a better man for all that confidence and trust, and wanted like hell to show I was worth it. The week after I was elected to the Council I married Rosie proper and right, thinking a Councillor ought to set an example in his community; and every one was very cordial to me about it, especially in my own ward, where two or three of them even followed my lead, saying that with the mail steamers now calling and the town generally on the up grade, it was time to let go on the old, wrong way of things, and get into line with civilization.

Whether it was the change from the coral islands or the lavish new diet or what, Rosie had been laying on flesh for a long time in a quiet, unnoticed kind of way till finally she suddenly plumped up like a balloon. My, but she grew something awful, a waddling, monstrous mountain of a woman, with her eyes burying like a pig’s, and the whole of her shaking as she walked. She was ashamed to go out any more except by night, sulking all day indoors, instead, and rocking in a hammock. As I said before, she’d never been right since Benny’s death, and though she had pulled up for a time and acted very much improved she slumped at last, and slumped worse than she ever had been. Her old surly fits on the Line were nothing compared with the rampageous way she went on now, and if there was ever a she devil on earth or a man driven plumb distracted it was Rosie and me in our splendid house.

When she was taken with those spells of hers she was nothing less than a cursing, snarling, foaming maniac, and stopped at nothing to make me a spectacle and a byword. Again and again she chased me out with an ax; she would fling into the store with nothing over her but a single dirty garment, and pull down whole shelves of stuff out of sheer devilment, screaming with rage. She slandered everybody, and reflected on every woman who was unfortunate enough to know us, so that I was sued twice for defamation–or rather she–with verdict and damages, all that I could do being to hold up my hands and tell the judge she wasn’t answerable for her actions. Hell, that was what it was–straight, unadulterated hell–with no way out that I could see till I died or she.

It was about this time I began to notice a fellow named Tyne on the beach–a thin, tall, hungry-looking man in a derby hat, very shabby black clothes, and no socks–who was said to be a busted doctor landed off of a French bark. His name came up before the Council, but as he had no papers or diplomas to show, and was hazy besides where he came from and how, we refused to let him practice, and were insulted besides at his daring to ask us.