"You don't want to take it to heart like that," he remonstrated cheerfully.
Ford, by way of reply, painstakingly analyzed the chief deficiencies of Sandy's immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long paragraphs of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with prismatic adjectives.

He waded through the first paragraph and well into the second before he mired in a hopeless jumble of unfamiliar polysyllables.
Sandy was not the skipping kind; he threw the book upon a bench and gave his attention wholly to his companion in time to save his great-grandfather from utter condemnation.
"What's eating you, Ford ?" he began pacifically--for Sandy was a weakling.

"You might be a lot worse off.

You're married, all right enough, from all I c'n hear--but she's left town.

It ain't as if you had to live with her." Ford looked at him a minute and groaned dismally.
"Oh, I ain't meaning anything against the lady herself," Sandy hastened to assure him.