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If, after all that, young Pupkin, even when he came to Mariposa, wore cameo pins and daffodil blazers, and broke out into ribbed silk saffron ties on pay day, it only shows that the old Adam still needs further tanning even in the Maritime Provinces. Young Pupkin, of course, was to have gone into law.
Whenever Pupkin thought of this two hundred dollars he understood all that it meant by social unrest. In fact, he interpreted all forms of social discontent in terms of it. Russian Anarchism, German Socialism, the Labour Movement, Henry George, Lloyd George, he understood the whole lot of them by thinking of his two hundred dollars. When I tell you that at this period Mr.
Pupkin had to admit that that couldn't be so. To know that, you had only to see Zena Pepperleigh put her arm round his neck and call him Daddy. She would do that even when there were two or three young men sitting on the edge of the piazza. You know, I think, the way they sit on the edge in Mariposa. It is meant to indicate what part of the family they have come to see.
Yet, though Pupkin often waited in this way for the train, he was never able to pick out a pair of wheels that suited him. Anyhow, it's awfully hard to tell an express from a fast freight. I wouldn't mention these attempts at suicide if one of them hadn't finally culminated in making Peter Pupkin a hero and solving for him the whole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena Pepperleigh.
What? You remember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high school teacher? In love with HER? What a ridiculous idea. You mean merely because on the night when the Mariposa Belle sank with every soul on board, Pupkin put off from the town in a skiff to rescue Miss Lawson. Oh, but you're quite wrong. That wasn't LOVE. I've heard Pupkin explain it himself a dozen times.
That sort of thing, paddling out to a sinking steamer at night in a crazy skiff, may indicate a sort of attraction, but not real love, not what Pupkin came to feel afterwards. Indeed, when he began to think of it, it wasn't even attraction, it was merely respect, that's all it was. And anyway, that was long before, six or seven months back, and Pupkin admitted that at the time he was a mere boy.
Pupkin was clean, plumb, straight, flat, absolutely in love with her. Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close the chapter and think about it. EIGHT. The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin Zena Pepperleigh used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the judge's house, half hidden by the Virginia creepers.
Yet in spite of this, Pupkin felt that the thing was hopeless: which only illustrates the dreadful ups and downs, the wild alternations of hope and despair that characterise an exceptional affair of this sort. Yes, it was hopeless. Every time that Pupkin watched Zena praying in church, he knew that she was too good for him.
And as for the poet well, can you imagine how Pupkin felt when Zena told him that the poet was married, and that the tubby little woman with her head on sideways was his wife? So they had the ice cream, and the poet ate it in bucketsful. Poets always do. They need it.
Pupkin senior sat there on the judge's verandah smoking a corn cob pipe as if he had never heard of Havana cigars in his life.
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