"For your trifling baldness is evident when you remove your hat, which, like a true gentleman, you never fail to do at the breakfast-table, and, after a fifteen years' experience with you, I for one can say that I have found you always the true friend when I needed you--I never told how, without my solicitation and entirely upon your own initiative, you once loaned me the money to pay Mrs. Pedagog's bill over which she was becoming anxious." "John," cried Mrs. Pedagog, severely, "did you ever do that?" "Well, my dear--er--only once, you know, and you were so relieved--" began Mr. Pedagog. "You should have lent the money to me, John," said Mrs. Pedagog, "and then I should not have been compelled to dun the Idiot." "I know, my dear, but you see I knew the Idiot would pay me back, and perhaps--well, only perhaps, my love--you might not have thought of it," explained the school-master, with a slight show of embarrassment. "The Ideal Husband is ever truthful, too," said the landlady, with a smile as broad as any. "Well, it's too bad, I think," said the Lawyer, "that a man has to be verging on sixty-three to be an Ideal Husband. I'm only forty-four, and I should hate to think that if I should happen to get married within the next two or three years my wife would have to wait at least fifteen years before she could find me all that I ought to be. Moreover, I have been told that I have black eyes." "With the unerring precision of a trained legal mind," said the Idiot, "you have unwittingly put your finger on the crux of the whole matter, Mr. Brief. Mrs. Pedagog has been describing _her_ Ideal Husband, and I am delighted to know that what I have always suspected to be the case is in fact the truth: that _her_ husband in her eyes is an ideal one. That's the way it ought to be, and that is why we have always found her the sweetest of landladies, but because Mrs. Pedagog prefers Mr. Pedagog in this race for supremacy in the domain of a woman's heart is no reason why you who are only bald-headed in your temper, like most of us, should not prove to be equally the ideal of some other woman--in fact, of several others. Women are not all alike. As a matter of fact, a gentleman named Balzac, who was the Marie Corelli of his age in France, once committed himself to the inference that no two women ever were alike, so that, if you grant the truth of old Balzac's inference, the Ideal Husband will probably vary to the extent of the latest count of the number of women in the world. So why give up hope because you are only forty-nine?" "Forty-four," corrected the Lawyer. "Pardon me--forty-four," said the Idiot. "When you are in the roaring forties, five or six years more or less do not really count. Lots of men who are really only forty-two behave like sixty, and I know one old duffer of forty-nine who has the manners of eighteen. The age question does not really count."