"Has she been leaning upon your slender purse?" he asked not unkindly. "Why--she saves money by me and I increase her social importance. Of course she had furniture, but it was old and--and--" I could not find the words to explain to a man my horror of ugliness. He wouldn't have understood. "Well, well, it makes no difference now. I must arrange matters for you, and I think you will agree, upon reflection, that the first step must be to give up whatever we can." "But, Uncle--" I tried to speak calmly, to show him the situation--"Mrs. Whitney is a Van Dam, and they befriended me when--why, they would never forgive me; it would be ruin. And even from the practical standpoint--you wouldn't like to have your lawbooks sold, would you? Well, people have introduced me--and pretty furniture and pretty clothes and not to have any scandal or any talk--oh, you can see!" "In the light of reports that reach me," said the Judge, "I might suppose that you"--he hesitated a moment, then continued, in an attempt at a bantering manner, "that you refer to your luxuries as preliminary to--ah--matrimony, which is said to be the only gainful occupation that my sex leaves almost exclusively to yours, and in which fine clothing is undoubtedly an adjuvant. But observation leads me to think that it is a business less profitable than is often imagined. Hm!" He drummed on the table, and when he continued, he seemed talking to gain time, considering what he wished to say. "I grant you," he said with his cumbrous playfulness, "that the sensibility of flesh and blood to beauty is as broad a fact as the effect of heat or cold. It is so universally recognised that we take a pretty girl, like original sin or the curse of labour, as a _chose jugeé_. Her sway must have begun with the glacial drifters and the kitchen middeners and the Engis skull man, when they and the rest of the paleoliths were battling with the dodo and the dinornis and the didifornis, and had no time for the cult of beauty except by proxy. Did it ever occur to you that we men drove a hard bargain with your sex when we compelled you to beauty, made you carry the topknots and the tail-feathers? Men propose marriage, women adorn themselves to listen. Let women choose their mates, and they might go as plain as peahens; and men would strut about, displaying wattles, combs and argus-eyed plumes." "Women would be less beautiful if they proposed?"