Much more dangerous, that sort of thing, to our thinking, than the primitive fascinations of Aphrodite herself! Indeed, we have sometimes thought that lady didn't go the right way to work in that affair with Adonis. She should have _sympathized_ with him. All the same, mind you!--so Cynicism murmurs at our elbow--man has an extraordinary faculty for detecting companion-souls to his own, pulses preordained to beat in unison with his, in bodies of extraordinary beauty, of indisputable grace. _He_ may squint, and his eyesight be defective, but his predestined She, the mate of his soul, will gaze on him through lustrous orbs of tender radiance. Her voice will reach him through the rosiest of lips, the pearliest of teeth, without so much as one gold stopping; and all the while there will he be, without a sound tooth in his head to boast of, unless he has the effrontery to make a parade of his crown-and-bridge treatment. He may even wear a wig, and brazen it out, in the same breath with a protest against a single false tress on the head of his other dearer life-in-life--this comes out of Poetry, somewhere--while as for a Venus Calva ... simply out of the question, thank you! Anyhow, the predestined mate of the soul was a much more kittle head of cattle to shoe behind when chosen for her beauty from among the daughters of an aristocracy not celebrated for ugliness, and manipulated by photographers into bestowing their eyes upon the readers of the shiniest print that ever lay on the table of an hotel reading-room. CHAPTER XXV OF AN UNCALLED FAMILY ROW, AND HOW BOB'S BREAKFAST WAS POSTPONED. OF A LETTER FROM JUDITH THAT MADE MATTERS WORSE