"Bewitching. Why does your lordship ask?" "Because her services might be valuable as an Old Maid." "Oh, if you could only get Diana to see it in that light!" "You seem anxious to be rid of her." "I do. I confess it. It has been growing on me for some time. You see hers is a soul perpetually seeking more light. She is always asking questions. This thirst for information would be made only more raging by marriage. You know what Stevenson says:--'To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel.' At present my occupations keep me away from her--but she answers my letters with as many queries as a 'Constant Reader.' She wants to know all I say, do, or feel, and I never see her without having to submit to a string of inquiries. It's like having to fill up a census paper once a week. If I don't see her for a fortnight she wants to know how I am the moment we meet. If this is so before marriage, what will it be after, when her opportunities of buttonholing me will be necessarily more frequent?" "But I see nothing to complain of in that!" said Lord Silverdale. "Tender solicitude for one's betrothed is the usual thing with those really in love. You wouldn't like her to be indifferent to what you were doing, saying, feeling?" The _Moon_-man winced. "No, that's just the dilemma of it, Lord Silverdale. I am afraid your lordship does not catch my drift. You see, with another man, it wouldn't matter; as your lordship says, he would be glad of it. But to me all that sort of thing's 'shop.' And I hate 'shop.' It's hard enough to be out interviewing all day, without being reminded of its when you get home and want to put your slippers on the fender and your feet inside them and be happy. No, if there's one thing in this world I can't put up with, it's 'shop' after business hours. I want to forget that I get my gold in exchange for notes of interrogation. I shudder to be reminded that there are such things in the world as questions--I tremble if I hear a person invert the subject and predicate of a sentence. I can hardly bear to read poetry because the frequent inversions make the lines look as if they were going to be inquisitive. Now you understand why I was so discourteous to your lordship, and I trust that you will pardon the curt expression of my hyper-sensitive feelings. Now, too, you understand why I shrink from the prospect of marriage, to the brink of which I once bounded so heedlessly. No, it is evident a life of solitude must be my portion. If I am ever to steep my wearied spirit in forgetfulness of my daily grind, if my nervous system is to be preserved from premature break-down, I must have no one about me who has a right of interrogation, and my housekeeper must prepare my meals without even the preliminary 'Chop or Steak, sir?' My home-life must be restful, peaceful, balsamic--it must exhale a papaverous aroma of categorical proposition." "But is there no way of getting a wife with a gift of categorical conversation?"