"MY DEAR MISS DULCIMER. "I have good news for you. Knowing your anxiety to find for me a way out of my matrimonial dilemma, I am pleased to be able to inform you that it has been found by my friend and literary adviser, Percy Swinshel Spatt, the well known philosopher and idealist. I met him writing down his thoughts in Bond Street. In the course of a dialogue upon the Beautiful, I put my puzzle to him and he solved it in a moment. 'Why _must_ you keep a servant?' he asked, for it is his habit to question every statement he does not make. 'Why not rather keep a mistress? Become a servant yourself and all your difficulties vanish.' It was like a flash of lightning. 'Yes,' I said, when I had recovered from the dazzle, 'but that would mean separation from my husband.' 'Why?' he replied with his usual habit. 'In many houses they prefer to take married couples.' 'Ah, but where should I find a man of like mind, a man to whom leisure for the cultivation of his soul was the one great necessity of life?' 'It is a curious coincidence, Eustasia,' he replied, 'that I was just myself contemplating keeping a master and retiring into a hermitage below stairs, to devote myself to philosophical contemplation. As a butler or a footman in a really aristocratic establishment, my duties would be nominal, and the other servants and my employers would attend to all my wants. Abstract speculation would naturally indue me with the grave silence and dignity which seem to be the chief duties of these superior creatures. It is possible, Eustasia, that I am not the first to perceive the advantages of this way of living and that plush is but the disguise of the philosopher. As for you, Eustasia, you could become a parlor-maid. Thus we should live together peacefully, with no sordid housekeeping cares, no squalid interests in rates or taxes, devoted heart and soul to the higher life.' 'You light up for me perspectives of Paradise,' I cried enthusiastically. 'Then let us get the key of the garden at once,' he replied rapturously, and turning over a new leaf of his philosophical note-book, he set to work then and there to draw up the advertisement: 'Wanted--by a young married couple, etc.' Of course we had to be a little previous, because I could not consent to marry him unless we had a situation to go to. We were only putting what the Greek grammars call a proleptic construction upon the situation. Well, it seems good servants are so scarce we got a place at once--the exact thing we were looking for. We are concealing our real names (lest the profession be overrun by jealous friends from Newnham and Girton and Oxford and Cambridge) so that I was able to give Percy a character and Percy to give me a character. We are going into our place next Monday afternoon, so, to avoid obtaining the