Perhaps the most ridiculous rule of civilized society—so he mused—was that limiting self-selectiveness. In the acquirement of everything else in life—stock, land, clothes, food—a person went thoroughly through the supply before choosing. Only in the matter of friends must he depend upon accident or the caprice of other friends. How much more satisfactory and straightforward it would be to search among the faces of strangers for one with personal appeal, then to go to its owner and say: “You look like my idea of a friend. How do I look to you?” And, if advisable in casual cases, such procedure should help especially in a man’s search for his mate. Take himself, now, and the emptiness of his life. His bankers had told him he could afford whatever he wanted. Suppose he wanted a woman, what sort of woman should he want? Beauty? Must she be beautiful? From the quickening of his pulse as he bent to peer into fair face after fair face with the added interest of this idea, he realized that he enjoyed and feared beauty at least as greatly as the most of men. Class? In a flashed thought of his mother, a Stansbury of _the_ Stansburys of Virginia, he decided on that. Class she must have. And kind she must be—tested kind to the core. Tall, healthy, strong, of course. Graceful if possible. Gracious, but not too much so. Frank and at the same time reserved. Educated up to full appreciation of, but not superiority to himself. Half boy and at least one-and-a-half girl. That would be plenty to start on, even for the most deliberate and calculating of choosers, which he felt himself dispositionally as well as financially fitted to be. From what he knew of the difficult sex in the rough, he should need time and study to decide accurately just how real were appearances in a finished feminine, trained from infancy, so he had heard, to cover all inner and outer deficiencies. Plenty of time and a steady nerve—that was all he should need to learn her nature, as he had learned the tempers of the most refractory of horses. By the time he was satisfied as to these mentally outlined points, others doubtless would have suggested themselves. Pape was pleased with his theories, the first dressed-up ones he had evolved on the subject. If all men would go into this vital matter of self-selectiveness, there would be fewer prosperous lawyers, he congratulated himself. Better have a care before marriage than a flock of them—of another sort—after. Firstly, a choice made from personal preference, then the most direct course toward acquaintanceship, a deliberate inspection, a steady eye, a cool nerve——