I shall reserve what I saw and heard in South America for another volume, one of a different kind. I shall go forward to the following spring when I was once more in New York. Edna and her daughter--so I read in the newspapers--were living in fitting estate in a famous villa they had taken in the fashionable part of the south of France, “for the health of the two young sons of the marchioness.” Frascatoni was gambling at Monte Carlo, Crossley was at his government post in London. I could fill in the tiresome details for both the wives and the husbands--and so, probably, can you. While some business matters were settling, I was turning over in my mind plans for making a systematic search for a wife. I count on your amusement confidently, gentle reader. If you wished a fresh egg for your breakfast or a suit of clothes to be worn a few weeks and discarded, or an automobile, you would set about getting it with some attention to the best ways and means. But, saturated as you are with silly sentimentalities about marriage, you believe that the most important matter in the world--the matter which determines your own happiness or unhappiness and also the current of posterity--you believe that such a matter should be left to the lottery of chance! Well, I had long since abandoned that delusion, and I purposed to establish my life with as much thought and care as I gave all other matters. “A dull fellow,” you are saying. “No wonder his wife fled from him.” I do not wonder that you regard as dull anything that is intelligent. To ignorance intelligence must necessarily seem dull. When any subject of real interest is brought up, some silly, empty-headed pretty woman is sure to say, “How dull! Let’s talk of something interesting.” And there will always be a chorus of laughing assent--because the woman is pretty. So I accept your sneer at me with a certain pleasure. I wish to be thought dull by some people, including some women very good to look at. But out of vanity and in fairness to Edna I must acquit her of having thought me dull--after she had been about the world.