The Cut-Glass Bowl

There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze
age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass
age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly
mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward
and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass
presents--punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses,
wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and
vases--for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it
was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion
from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.

After the wedding the punch-bowls were arranged in the sideboard
with the big bowl in the centre; the glasses were set up in the
china-closet; the candlesticks were put at both ends of
things--and then the struggle for existence began. The bonbon
dish lost its little handle and became a pin-tray upstairs; a
promenading cat knocked the little bowl off the sideboard, and
the hired girl chipped the middle-sized one with the sugar-dish;
then the wine-glasses succumbed to leg fractures, and even the
dinner-glasses disappeared one by one like the ten little
niggers, the last one ending up, scarred and maimed as a
tooth-brush holder among other shabby genteels on the bathroom
shelf. But by the time all this had happened the cut-glass age
was over, anyway.

It was well past its first glory on the day the curious Mrs.
Roger Fairboalt came to see the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper.

"My dear," said the curious Mrs. Roger Fairboalt, "I LOVE your
house. I think it's QUITE artistic."

"I'm SO glad," said the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper, lights
appearing in her young, dark eyes; "and you MUST come often. I'm
almost ALWAYS alone in the afternoon."

Mrs. Fairboalt would have liked to remark that she didn't believe
this at all and couldn't see how she'd be expected to--it was
all over town that Mr. Freddy Gedney had been dropping in on Mrs.
Piper five afternoons a week for the past six months. Mrs.
Fairboalt was at that ripe age where she distrusted all beautiful
women---

"I love the dining-room MOST," she said, "all that MARVELLOUS
china, and that HUGE cut-glass bowl."

Mrs. Piper laughed, so prettily that Mrs. Fairboalt's lingering
reservations about the Freddy Gedney story quite vanished.

"Oh, that big bowl!" Mrs. Piper's mouth forming the words was a
vivid rose petal. "There's a story about that bowl---"

"Oh---"

"You remember young Carleton Canby? Well, he was very attentive
at one time, and the night I told him I was going to marry
Harold, seven years ago in