“It was this: Where did you spend your summer at the end of your freshman year? He told me. Then I gave him a box made to order for me by a French expert, which would deceive other experts so long as we did not try to sell it. Anybody can imitate the goldwork of any period. In all the museums of the world you will find fakes. Attention to details! I was prepared to have him show that box to local experts. I assumed he would do so, being a Merriwether and, therefore, intelligently curious.” “Box with what?” asked Mr. Merriwether, also intelligently curious. “Wait! When your son told me where he spent his summer at the end of his freshman year I knew he was then about nineteen--too young to think of marriage, but old enough to think of love. He had for the first time in his life been free from home influences and direct parental supervision. He was bound to regard himself as a man of the world and think of innocent flirtations as a manly art. Being in that frame of mind, and at the same time being a nice, rich, good-looking chap, all the girls would naturally make a dead set for him. Their numbers would keep him from having one love-affair. All love-affairs at twenty are much the same. A boy always begins by being in love with love. Indeed, I believe twenty-year love to be exclusively a literary passion--that, is, boys get it from reading about it. Of course I studied time, period, locality, and manifold probabilities; and, therefore, I sent him on a mission that suggested love--love for the one girl that Fate intended him to love and to marry. In order to fix, accentuate, and accelerate his love-thinking I used the perfume of sweet peas.” “How does that work?” “I picked out sweet peas because they are found everywhere. Their odor is strong and characteristic. He must have inhaled that odor thousands of times when he was flirting with pretty girls the summer he spent at Oleander Point with Dr. Bonner.” “Yes; but about suggesting--” “I advise you to read up on the psychology of odor associations. You will learn that there is a very close relation between the olfactory sense and the desire to love. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that memory, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than by almost any other channel; and, also, that 'olfactory impressions tend to be associated with a sum-total of feeling-tone.' This has been known for thousands of years. A very interesting paper was written by Mackenzie, of Johns Hopkins. If you read it you will know more than I can now take the time to tell you. The Orient understands the value of perfumes in lovemaking, and I could tell you amazing things; but I will refer you to Cabanis, Dadisett, Hobbes, Jaworski, Jwanicki, Schiff, Wolff, and Zwaardemaker. If you wish, my secretary will prepare an exhaustive bibliography of the subject for you.” “No, thanks,” said Mr. Merriwether. “But I still don't understand--”