BOOK ONE

THE MAN WHO LIVED
IN A SHOE

CHAPTER I

Are there any women today, I wonder, like the girlwife of Jacopone da Todi, who are found in the midst ofworldly brilliance wearing the hair shirt of piety anddevotion over their spotless hearts?

I doubt it.

It is no wonder that Jacopone, that "smart" thirteenth-centuryItalian lawyer, became a great saint when hemade that discovery, after his beautiful young wife'saccidental death. It would make a saint of anybody.

I am quite sure Gertrude is not like that. But thenGertrude is not my wife—as yet. Nor am I Jacopone.I am nothing more, I fear, than a contented voluptuaryof a bookworm. Like King James, I feel that were itmy fate to be a captive, I should wish to be shut up ina great library consuming my days among myfellow-prisoners, the blessed books.

To distil the reading of a lifetime into a little wisdomfor my poor wits, that has been all my aim and myambition, if by any name so dynamic as ambition I may callit. An old young man is what I have been called, andGertrude seems propelled by some potent urge to changeme—God knows why.

I have just been talking with—I mean listening to—Gertrude.

We are to be married, she says, in three weeks.

Time out of mind we have been friends, Gertrude andI, as our mothers had been before us. She, the highlymodern spinster and I, such as I am, have been linkedfor years by an engagement which is not an engagementin the old sense at all. It is a sort of entente cordiale.An engagement in the conventional meaning of the wordwould be as abhorrent to Gertrude as the old-fashionedmarriage. As soon would she think of "being given inmarriage" with bell, book and orange blossoms as ofcalling herself "Mrs. Randolph Byrd"—or anythingbut Miss Bayard.

That is what we have been discussing this gloomyafternoon

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