“You are regarded as extremely useful. You are usher, best man, friend in need. You balance the table with the nice girl who is to be conservatively brought into the game. Single men tell you their hopes, married men their troubles. You can run a german or a chafing-dish. You always let a girl with a bad complexion have her back to the window, and when they ask you to make a light, you don’t set things flaring like a barroom. You flatter them by well-timed antagonisms. You never let it seem that you have permitted them to win, and you never beat them badly. You never flatter in words if there is a way of doing the thing by an action. You please the plain and tease the pretty. You ask nothing and you get everything—everything but the greatest thing of all.” [Illustration] “You have left out some things,” said Tranton, smiling, “several important things.” He seemed to be going over these in his mind. “It is quite natural. You couldn’t know. We all have to persuade ourselves—unless we are a complaining bore—that life has great compensations for us. We _have_ to stay satisfied. An optimist such as I am is like one of those story-telling liars who repeatedly increase the figures, not merely to assure the astonishment of each new listener, but to keep up their own interest.” “Are you an optimist?” “Of course I am. Even on your own showing I have much to be thankful for. I may not have the greatest rewards, but I have many that are sweet if not great. If the best man sometimes sees the other fellow get the best woman, he also sees him take the great risks,—also sees him take the woman who is not best. If the stunning girls marry some one else, they expect a great deal from the some one else, and if they stop being stunning the burden of that is not too keenly on me. The new era finds them immensely discriminating, hard to please. They have a wide choice nowadays, and they exercise that choice with the austerity of a sovereign. Just now they are a little tired of dukes. They like football heroes better. And then there is always the trooper. He is in great demand. Then, too, the girls are getting very tall. It is hard to pair well with them. They are getting dreadfully clever, too, and that must make it intellectually difficult continuously to live up to them. The taste for violent contrasts seems to me degenerate. I hope the fashion will go out. I met Miss Wainscott the other day with little Carew. I tell you, they looked _wrong_. Then there is that little canary bird of a Miss Prune just engaged to big Kane. I joked her about him and she said she could say of him as Don Quixote said of Morgante, that though of gigantic size he was most gentle in his manners. Of course, she will subdue Kane,—I told her she would make sugar Kane of him,—these little women are wonders. But that does not modify the spectacular absurdity of it.” [Illustration: And then There is always the Trooper]