Part 3
A CASE OF EAVESDROPPING
Jim Shorthouse was the sort of fellow who always made a mess of
things. Everything with which his hands or mind came into contact
issued from such contact in an unqualified and irremediable state
of mess. His college days were a mess: he was twice rusticated. His
schooldays were a mess: he went to half a dozen, each passing him
on to the next with a worse character and in a more developed state
of mess. His early boyhood was the sort of mess that copy-books and
dictionaries spell with a big "M," and his babyhood—ugh! was the
embodiment of howling, yowling, screaming mess.
At the age of forty, however, there came a change in his
troubled life, when he met a girl with half a million in her own
right, who consented to marry him, and who very soon su
