Downloadable HTML fileAinslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 by Various Authors. Page: 2

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The Flatterer George Hibbard

The Miracle of Dawn Madison Cawein

The Song of Broadway Robert Stewart

Green Devils and Old Maids Emerson G. Taylor

Two Sorrows Charles Hanson Towne

Love and Mushrooms Frances Wilson

Some Feminine Stars Alan Dale

For Book Lovers Archibald Lowery Sessions


THE OUTGOING OF SIMEON

By ELIZABETH DUER

Simeon Ponsonby--the professor of botany at Harmouth--had married when over forty the eldest daughter of a distinguished though impecunious family in his own college town. His mother, on her deathbed, foresaw that he would need a housekeeper and suggested the match.

"Simeon," she said, "it isn't for us to question the Lord's ways, but I am mortally sorry to leave you, my son; it is hard for a man to shift for himself. I was thinking now if you were to marry Deena Shelton you might go right along in the old house. The Sheltons would be glad to have her off their hands, and she is used to plain living. She would know enough to keep her soup pot always simmering on the back of the range and make her preserves with half the regular quantity of sugar. I like her because she brushes her hair and parts it in the middle, and she has worn the same best dress for three years."

Soon after Mrs. Ponsonby died and Simeon married Deena.

She didn't particularly want to marry him, but then, on the other hand, she was not violently set against it. She saw romance through her mother's eyes, and Mrs. Shelton said Professor Ponsonby was a man any girl might be proud to win. If his sympathies were as narrow as his shoulders, his scientific reputation extended over the civilized world, and Harmouth was proud of the fact. Deena's attention was not called to his sympathies, and it was called to his reputation.

He proposed to Miss Shelton in a few well-chosen words, placed his mother's old-fashioned diamond ring on h

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