Or then on the other hand, possibly Jerome Bracken's marriage was a success because he picked precisely the sort of woman who had the qualifications for being a suitable wife to an up-and-coming man, a man who kept on up and kept on coming until he had arrived, with both feet planted on how firm a foundation! But then Jerome always had been, as the phrase is, a clever picker. He proved that when as a very young man he moved to Dyketon and picked Queen Sears for his girl. He kept on proving it--by picking the right business, the right code of deportment before the eyes of mankind, the right church to belong to, and precisely the right father-in-law.
This Queenie Sears, now; she was not the one he married, naturally not. Queenie Sears was not the sort any man in his sane senses would marry, she being what used to be called a fancy woman. She was an inmate of Madam Carrie Rupert's house when he first met her and it was there, under that hospitable but disreputable roof, down on Front Street in Dyketon's red-light district, that the meeting took place.
About this first meeting there was nothing significant. He called, a stranger, and she entertained him, it being her business to entertain callers. He at this time was a shrewd but countrified youth of twenty or thereabouts. She was a little older than that, blonde, simple-minded, easy-going, rather pretty in an insipid way, with a weak, self-indulgent mouth. Already she was plump, with the certainty before her that, barring ill health to pull her down, the succeeding years would enhance her plumpness into rolls and cushions of fat. Probably, if the truth were known, she deliberately elected to take on this life she was leading. However, and be that as it may, she had the customary story to account for her present vocation when somebody who was maudlin with a sympathy based on alcohol asked her how she came to be what she was.
Hers was a stock story lacking novelty as well as sincerity--a sentimental fiction dealing with a trusting and ignorant maiden's downfall in an orange grove vaguely described as being "away down South," and then discovery and disgrace and a traditional proud father whose heart could be flinty and yet broken, and a shamed girl's flight in the night and all the rest of the stage props. But sometimes it was a plantation instead of an orange grove; or if the inquirer happened to be a Southerner, it might be a ranch in the far West. Queenie was taking no chances on getting herself checked up.