"I must say that I think it would be a great mistake for a doctor to marry a woman who looks as if she couldn't live through the week," she responded. "I should suppose it would ruin any physician's practice to have a wife as woebegone as that Mrs. Poole! Of course, I don't know her, and I've nothing to say against her, and she may be as beautiful and as charming as you say she is." "I give her up at once," he declared, laughing. "She shall never even know how near she came to having a chance to reject me." "Is that all?" the girl asked, a little spitefully. "Have you anybody else on your list?" "I have only just one more," he replied. "Who is she?" was the girl's quick question. "I'm not sure that you have met her," he returned. "She's from the South somewhere, or the Southwest, I don't know--" "What's her name?" was the impatient query. "Chubb," he answered. "It's not a pretty name, is it? But that doesn't matter if I'm to persuade her to change it." "Chubb?" the girl repeated, as though trying to recall the name. "Chubb? Not Virgie Chubb?" "Her name is Virginia," he admitted. The girl by his side laughed a little shrilly. "Virgie Chubb?" she cried. "That scrawny thing?" The Doctor confessed that Miss Chubb was not exactly plump. "Not plump? I should think not, indeed," the girl declared. "Do you know what Miss Marlenspuyk said about her? She said that Virgie Chubb looked like a death's-head on a toothpick! That's what she said!" They were approaching the Mall, and the Doctor knew that his time was now very brief. They had to slow up just then, as a policeman was conveying across the broad road three or four nurses with a baby-carriage or two, and then they had to steer clear of half a dozen working-men going home across the Park, with pipes in their mouths and dinner-pails swinging in their hands. "So you don't think Miss Chubb would be a good wife for me?" he inquired. "I have nothing to say at all! It isn't really any of my business!" she replied. "It is simply absurd of you to ask me!" "But you must help me out," he urged. "So far you have only told me that I mustn't marry any of the girls I had on my list." "I don't want to see you throw yourself away," she returned. "A pretty kind of a friend I should be if I encouraged you to marry your Virgie Chubb and your Widow Poole!" "That's it, precisely," he asserted; "that's why I've come to you. Of course, I don't want to throw myself away. Your advice has been invaluable to me--simply invaluable. But so far you have only shown me how it is that none of these girls will suit. That brings me no nearer my object. I've simply got to have a wife." "I don't see why you need be in such a hurry," she replied. "I must, I must!" he retorted. "And there's one more girl I haven't mentioned so far--" "You've kept her to the last!" she snapped.