After Eloise had left Aunt Lucretia sat quietly thinking, looking now and then at a pedigree of Eloise which she had once made and hung over my mantel. It was framed in walnut and decorated with fancy letters. At last she smiled. "Isn’t she a thoroughbred, Jack?" "I haven’t really got my breath yet, Aunt Lucretia," I answered. "I never dreamed she would grow into a being so beautiful. Don’t you really believe you might er—er—hurry up this—er—affair—" and I stopped, blushing. Aunt Lucretia broke out in her rare, good-humored laugh. "Poor boy! Jack, you must be careful. You talk as if you had a real case of the silly, unsensible thing." "Always had it, Aunt Lucretia," I smiled weakly. "Jack, that would be very unfortunate. I want you to marry on common sense—not love." "You know how I have always loved her," I went on. Aunt Lucretia glanced sharply at me. "I mean how I’ve cared for her," I amended. "But do you—do you honestly believe, Aunt Lucretia, that she loves me—cares for me that way?" "Tut—tut," she said sharply, "what nonsense you talk! What does it matter? This silly love business has spoiled more good pedigrees and brought more fools into the world, I tell you, than anything else under the sun. What a fine breed of folks we’d have had in the world by now if so many idiots had not fallen in love and married without a moment’s thought of results. You ought to be grateful to me, Jack," she continued after a while; "you will be grateful, I am sure, some day, that you had me to select a wife for you and didn’t just happen to fall in love. That’s an accident often as fatal as happening to fall down the steps. "It is awful, Jack, this haphazard of humanity!" she went on in a moment. "No wonder only one in a hundred is born who has got any brains in his head. Think of it, Jack, our race is so pig-headed from thoughtless marryings that it took them three hundred years after they invented a saddle before it dawned upon them that they needed stirrups to complete it. Rode three centuries on bare saddles for lack of sense enough to invent stirrups! Some day for the benefit of humanity I am going to open a human Registry. I want to do this because I think it is our duty to try to teach people to take as much interest in their own children’s pedigree as they do in their horses’ or dogs’. Many a man falls in love with and marries a woman whose qualities and character, and pedigree, if she were a horse, he wouldn’t be caught trading a blind mule for! And many a woman, under the same divine influence, marries some vicious brute of a man for no other reason than because she has just fallen in love with him, or maybe wants to reform him, who, if he were turned into a buggy horse she wouldn’t be caught risking her neck behind.