"Seriously," said I. "I have often thought of marriage, but, you know, I am one of those unfortunates who have been born to high place. In me you see the apotheosis of the Mudison ambition for centuries. My brothers all married for love, and have been forgotten. To me it was left to uphold the family name, and to do it I have an income sufficient to pay for my apartment in town and my visits to my friends at Newport; to allow me a few luxuries like a horse or two and a car. But I have to economize. Suppose I married? I see the decline of the Mudisons. I see my fortune divided, say into three, and my children compelled by our straitened circumstances to move in the dancing-class set, their children going to the upper West Side, and our name plastered beneath the speaking-tubes of the Ophelia and the Clarissa. We owe something to posterity, so I had vowed that I should be the last of the Mudisons." By this time, _King Mark_, aroused by the singing, had reached the garden, and _Sir Melot_ had mortally wounded _Tristan_ between the right side and the arm. The curtain was down. The house was in ecstasies, and Roardika and Dumple were seesawing to and fro across the stage, showing their teeth in thanks. "You notice that I said I had vowed," I whispered to Mrs. Underbunk. "Ah," she cried, "fortunate Miss Twitter!" It is very clever the way women have of seeming to try to sidetrack you when they want you to keep on the main line. But I am an old campaigner myself. The trout is never so beautiful as when he is running away from the hook. "You flatter me," said I. "Miss Twitter may be fortunate, but I know that at present I am the most forlorn of mortals. Don't you notice how interested she seems in Winthrop Jumpkin?" Mrs. Underbunk raised her glasses and inspected Constance eagerly. "She has a little color to-night," she said. "That is one of her charms," said I, refusing her proffered glasses. "It does enhance her beauty. Ordinarily, you know, she is rather of the marble-statuesque style." "A style men admire very much when it's fixed on a gold pedestal," said Mrs. Underbunk. She had recovered her temper, and was smiling. My heart was beating outrageously fast, and for my own preservation I had about determined not to punish her further. "I said that I had vowed," I began. But she suddenly became interested in her glasses. "Who are those people in the third box from that absurd-looking person in red with a diamond coronet in her hair?" she said. "Everybody is staring at them. You see the sad-looking little man sitting beside a very tall, thin girl? That other, I suppose, is her mother--looks like the old woman who went to market, only her gown has been snipped off from the top." "It's Mrs. Very," I answered, a bit nettled that Mrs. Underbunk had become interested in others; but women are generally more than a match for us. "The little man is the Earl of Less--the Verys have just bought him. But I said I had vowed----"