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So Pupkin sat there in the gloom and listened to this poet reciting Browning and he realized that everybody understood it but him. He walked straight down Oneida Street and along the Main Street just as hard as he could go. There was only one purpose in his mind, suicide.
Pupkin felt when he first spoke with Zena and sat beside her as they copied out the "endless chain" letter asking for ten cents.
They wrote out, as I said, no less than eight of the letters between them, and they found out that their handwritings were so alike that you could hardly tell them apart, except that Pupkin's letters were round and Zena's letters were pointed and Pupkin wrote straight up and down and Zena wrote on a slant. Beyond that the writing was so alike that it was the strangest coincidence in the world.
What was Peter Pupkin doing, then, at eight hundred dollars in a bank in Mariposa? If you ask that, it means that you know nothing of the life of the Maritime Provinces and the sturdy temper of the people.
Of course when they made figures it was different and Pupkin explained to Zena that in the bank you have to be able to make a seven so that it doesn't look like a nine. So, as I say, they wrote the letters all afternoon and when it was over they walked up Oneida Street together, ever so slowly.
I have already mentioned, I think, how Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh first came to know one another. Like everything else about them, it was a sheer matter of coincidence, quite inexplicable unless you understand that these things are fore-ordained. That, of course, is the way with fore-ordained affairs and that's where they differ from ordinary love. I won't even try to describe how Mr.
Pupkin hadn't had time to say yes before the judge appeared at the door, just as they were stepping up on to the piazza, and he had a table napkin in his hand and the dynamite sparks were flying from his spectacles as he called out: "Great heaven! Zena, why in everlasting blazes can't you get in to tea at a Christian hour?"
He was heading straight for Jim Eliot's drug store on the main corner and his idea was to buy a drink of chloroform and drink it and die right there on the spot. As Pupkin walked down the street, the whole thing was so vivid in his mind that he could picture it to the remotest detail.
You've heard perhaps of the Tidal Transportation Company, and Fundy Fisheries Corporation, and the Paspebiac Pulp and Paper Unlimited? Well, all of those were Pupkin senior under other names. So just imagine him in Mariposa! Wouldn't he be utterly foolish there?
So the upshot of it was that instead of taking chloroform, Pupkin stepped up to the counter of the fountain and he had a bromo-seltzer with cherry soda, and after that he had one of those aerated seltzers, and then a couple of lemon seltzers and a bromo-phizzer. I don't know if you know the mental effect of a bromo-seltzer. But it's a hard thing to commit suicide on. You can't.
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