Armitage, on his favorite subject, talked and talked. I did not listen attentively--not so much because I did not like what he was saying or because I thought him prejudiced as because I knew him to be a secret snob of the thoroughgoing variety. I suspected that if things were reversed, if he could get a title by marriage and a position that would enable him to swagger and would make everyone bow and scrape, he would put the eagerest of the female title-hunters to the blush. It may be just and proper to criticise women for being what they are. But let us also hear in mind that it is not their fault but the fault of their training; also that the men do no better when they have the chance to live in idle vanity upon the labors of some one else. On the following Monday my emissary returned from Garton Hall full to the brim with news. But first he had again to assure himself that there was no pretense in my seeming anxiety to be free. I saw doubt of me in his eyes before he began his adroit cross-examination. I gave no sign that I knew what he was about; for in those cases the one chance of convincing is to submit to whatever tests may be applied. It was not unnatural that he should doubt, coming as he did direct from seeing and talking with the charming Edna. Men are habitually fools about women--not because women make fools of them but because they enjoy the sensation of making fools of themselves. That is a sensation much praised by poets, romancers, sentimentalists of all kinds; and because of this praise it has come to have a certain fictitious value, has come to be a cheap way for a man to imagine himself a devil of a fellow, a figure of romantic recklessness. There is no limit to which the passion for living up to a pose will not carry a man. Men have flung away their fortunes, their lives, for the sake of a pose; martyrs have burned at the stake for pose. So a man of experience even more than your ordinary brick-brained citizen is distrustful of his fellow men where women are concerned. And it is nothing against Armitage’s intelligence, nor any sign of his having a low estimate of my strength of mind, that he tried to make absolutely sure of me before proceeding.