Of course boy and girl marriages would never do. Joint inexperience is a sure guarantee of disaster. Still, sentimental persons may be permitted one sigh of regret for a millennium which, however hopelessly idyllic and unpractical it might be, would at any rate prevent young men from marrying wealthy widows, and pretty girls from giving themselves, in exchange for a position in society, to middle-aged gentlemen with five-figure incomes. And if a young man must spend the best years of his life in repressing his tenderest instincts, let us at any rate refrain from laughing at his struggles. All of which brings us back to Pip. The female sex exercised a more than usual fascination over him. Brought up in a circle almost exclusively male,--Pipette was too completely subservient to himself to have any direct influence on the moulding of his character,--Pip regarded women in general much as the poor Indian regards the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies,--as things not to be understood or approached, but merely to be worshipped. Pip was a Galahad,--an extremely reserved, slow-moving, and, at times, painfully shy Galahad,--but a very perfect gentle knight for all that. He treated all women, from his sister's friends to the most plebeian young person who ever dispensed refreshment across a bar, with a grave courtesy which the more frivolous members of that captious sex occasionally found rather dull. Such a girl was Miss Madeline Carr. Pip had met her six months before on a visit to the home of his friend Dick Blane, and, being a healthy young man and twenty-one, had fallen in love with her. Being Pip, he did the thing thoroughly, and made no attempt to conceal his devotion. Unfortunately, Madeline was of a type, not uncommon, which only wants what it cannot get, and thinks but little of what may be had for nothing.