Now it may seem a little strange instead of this that we have never thought to feature poor Rollins as the Celibate. To "double" him as it were as Celibate and Bore. Conserving thereby one by no means inexpensive outfit of water-proof clothes, twenty-one meals, a week's wash, and Heaven knows how many rounds of Scotch at a time of imminent drought. But Rollins--though as far as anybody knows, a bachelor and eminently chaste--is by no means my idea of a Celibate. Oh, not Rollins! Not anybody with a mind like Rollins! For Rollins, poor dear, would marry every day in the week if anybody would have him. It's the "other people" who have kept Rollins virgin. But George Keets on the other hand is a good deal of a "fascinator" in spite of his austerity, perhaps indeed because of his austerity, tall, lean, good-looking, extravagantly severe, thirty-eight years old, and a classmate of my Husband at college. Whether Life would ever succeed or not in breaking down his unaccountable intention never-to-mate, that intention,--physical, mental, moral, psychic, call it whatever you choose,--was stamped indelibly and for all time on the curiously incongruous granite-like finish of his originally delicate features. Life had at least done interesting historical things to George Keets's face. "Oh, George!" cried my Husband, "I thought you were in Egypt digging mummies." "I was," admitted George without any further palaver of greeting. "When did you get back?" cried my Husband, "And what are you doing now!" "And where are you going to be in May?" I interposed with perfectly uncontrollable interest. "Why, I'm just off the boat, you know," brightened George. "A drink would be good, of course. But first I'd just like to run into the library for a minute to see if they've put in any new thrillers while I've been gone. There's a corking new book on Archselurus that ought to be due about now." "On w-what?" I stammered. "Oh, fossil cats, you know, and all that sort of thing," explained George chivalrously. "But, of course--you, Mrs. Delville," he hastened now to appease me, "would heaps rather hear about Paris fashions, I know. So if you-people really should want me in May I'll try my best, I promise you, to remember every latest wrinkle of lace, or feather. Only, of course," he explained with typical conscientiousness, "in the museums and the libraries one doesn't see just--of course--the----" "On the contrary, Mr. Keats," I interrupted hectically, "there is no subject in the world that interests me more--at the moment--than Mummies. And by the second week in May that interest will have assumed proportions that----" "S-sh!" admonished my Husband. "But really, George," he himself hastened to cut in, "if you could come to us the second week in May----" "May?" considered George. "Second week? Why, certainly I will." And bolted for the library, while my Husband and I in a perfectly irresistible impulse drew aside on the curbing to watch him disappear.