“Don’t apologize, Mr. Scientist. I suspect that the trouble with me is that I can’t get up a personal interest in marriage. I have no prejudice against it as an institution, or as a—state of mind. I am not even single because I am cautious. No one has preached to me the philosophy of disenchantment. I know married people who are happy, and single people who are unhappy. I have seen the tall girl and the short man, and the tall man and the short girl, illustrate the splendid paradoxes of pairing. I believe that marriage is just as good and just as bad as the people who illustrate it. But I haven’t been able to get up any personal interest in it, any more than I have been able to get up a personal interest in the law or medicine. After all, marriage is a career. I don’t hate the Church because I do not feel called to preach. Yet I don’t feel that I have the least instinctive aversion to marriage. Do you suppose that if I were a born old maid I should be conscious of the instinctive removal?” [Illustration] “Probably not. Do you hear that music in the hotel parlor that has supplied a plaintive accompaniment to our talk?” “That is Miss—hush! If ever there was an old maid born—” “Yes, and that woman has dreamed of marriage from her girlhood. Wasn’t it Charles Lamb who said with regard to music that he was sentimentally disposed to harmony but applicably was incapable of a tune? Poetry and the old maid instinct have battled in that woman for forty years. But we are slipping from science into gossip. Shouldn’t she answer your question?” [Illustration] “I don’t know. Who can say that she isn’t conscious of the instinct? Lamb knew that he couldn’t actually make a tune. It was Lamb, wasn’t it, who tried all his life to like Scotsmen? And when he gave up at the end he was so sweet about it. He couldn’t like them, but he didn’t have a bit of additional resentment because he had failed. Some people hate—with interest from the date of prejudice. Now I have been trying for—quite a few years to like marriage,—personally, you know,—and if I fail I don’t expect to place any interest charges against the institution.” “And on the other hand, if you succeed, you mustn’t expect marriage to pay you too heavily on the investment.” “I’m afraid I should be more likely to do that than the other. I suppose that shows that I am not a philosopher. If I ever marry—but how ridiculous that sounds! You would think I was talking about—any other career.”