“Oh, if I were selling stock in matrimony, I should consider you quite a hopeful case. But I’ll wager that many another man has thought the same thing. And naturally you have not been seriously conscious of the phases of yourself that have made you seem like a hopeful case to them. I was reading the other day in a new Franklin biography an advertisement written by Franklin and appearing in his paper. It concerned certain missing books of his, and was headed: ‘Lent and Forgot to Whom,’ Ah! my dear, it is so with many of you women: you lend and forget to whom. But the men—” “What a dreadfully unfortunate analogy! If they keep that which does not belong to them, am I to blame? And how can a girl try to like matrimony without trying to like men? I ought not to be feminine enough to remind you that men have been known to ‘forget to whom.’ Do you see that young fellow coming up the path with the girl in white duck? You see what an adroit, hovering style he has? I know just the sort of thing he is saying to that white duckling. He is one of the men who forget to whom. He is a Cynic-Maker.” We watched them silently as they sauntered up the path. [Illustration] “Yes,” I said, “that is the way the great tangle begins. A nice girl meets your Cynic-Maker, finds that he forgets to whom, from which she concludes that all men are a mockery. Then some honest young fellow meets her, revolts at her crude, newly fledged cynicism, which an older or a less honest man might have penetrated in a moment, decides that all women are depraved, and there you are with all the elements of a social tragedy. We may say that the arch-mischief-maker is the man who creates the cynic; yet we should, perhaps, inquire whether any new conditions are producing him.” “He is as old as lying,” she said quietly, her eyes following him up the steps. “The one comfort,” I added, “is that he probably does not succeed in making cynics so easily as in an earlier state of society.” “You mean that girls are more skeptical?” “I mean that girls have more freedom, more experience, more information, more opportunities for comparison, and that the Cynic-Maker, to succeed, has to be vastly cleverer than he used to be.” “I believe I shall join you in that optimism, though I am inclined to think that by an operation of natural selection he is vastly cleverer than he used to be.” The Cynic-Maker sat down beside the white duckling at the other end of the veranda. “Witness,” I said, “the grotesque appositions of life: The Cynic-Maker and the Victim at one end of the stage, and the Spectator with the Left-Over Girl at the Other. Surely we have here some very important elements of a social allegory.” “And in spite of everything,” mused the Left-Over Girl, “I was going to say just now that I thought marriage was more popular than ever.” “What makes you think that—I mean in view of the statistics, in view of the census of the unmarried?”