It was not surprising to my friends that I had given up all hope for myself. As I have said, I was no man for style. It always seemed to me that my clothes fitted me when I was buying them, but it never struck anybody else that way afterward. I paid the same prices as Jim, but I would have done just as badly at three times as much, and might just as well have saved money buying second-hand through a want "ad." Nature designed me to spoil tailoring. If I had lived in Eden the fig leaves on my belt would have browned and cracked before noon the first day, and if a few figs were then worn on the side as fringe ornaments, I would have carelessly picked them inside out, making the suit look seedier still. On a foggy morning the dewdrops of Paradise would have spotted me, and on a windy day the flying burrs and feather-tailed seeds would have taken me for good ground; the pussy willows and all such forest fuzz and excelsior--for a good thing. If I had been a Roman no one would have seen me down street, for I would be in the baths waiting for my wrapper to be scoured, washed and mended. This is a way Fate has of keeping a few scholars and investigators in the world. Herbert Spencer would have been swamped in a family, and the same with George Eliot. If they had married each other, as Herbert says they might (had Georgie been better-looking), philosophical and imaginative genius would have been lost in getting the meals and bending posterity over the parental knee to make sin seem undesirable. I had always felt that Jim was cut out to get married, and I stood ready to help him through the entire catalogue of crime and conspiracy, for I knew he could not undertake so much alone as well as I knew glue from tallow coming two miles by air line. If Jim wanted to do it, though, I would give him the benefit of my knowledge of the theory of courtship, a subject I was well up in, having read considerably more fiction than he had. This with my keen intuitive perceptions, I felt fitted me to act again in an advisory capacity, for my critical faculties were massive, although, as I have hinted, my executive qualities as a lover were undersized.