"It's the sort of idea I started out with," Matheson returned, beating his tennis boot softly with his racquet and idly watching the pipe-clay rise in little clouds. He laughed suddenly. "I don't know about looking nice, but I had a fancy for playing games. Life itself seemed a game. But it isn't. And playing games doesn't provide one with a banking account." "Of course it's different for men. I don't advocate games for _every one_," she assured him gravely. "But girls don't need to think about banking accounts." "Some of them must," he said. She looked at him in surprise. "I wasn't speaking of _that_ sort of girl; I meant my own girls," she answered in a tone that opened up all the social distances before Matheson's amazed vision. "I think responsibility _unsexes_ a woman," she added; and her bewildered listener felt that the final nail had been driven into the coffin containing the discredited remains of the girl-worker's claim to respectability. That was the tone of the Rondebosch household; and the head of the house, whose flourishing business made this comfortable despite of everything save leisure possible to his womenkind, showed his appreciation of their views by spending as little time under his roof-tree as was compatible with his position in relation to the family. Matheson had met Mr Aplin only once when he dined at the house. Macfarlane called him morose, but Matheson rather liked the silent, heavy, bored-looking man whose presence his wife and daughters managed to eclipse. "It was seeing the old man among them scared me off," Macfarlane informed him. "Any man who marries one of them can look forward to becoming like that. He's a cipher in the house. They do well to keep him in the background as a rule. But there's lots of money. If a man isn't particular in other respects... there you are." Money undoubtedly swelled the train of the Aplin girls' admirers; but it was not a sufficiently powerful magnet to attract Matheson. As he explained one day in a burst of confidence to Macfarlane, he could not dispense altogether with brains in a life-partner. "They are pretty," he allowed,--"and jolly nice to talk with for an afternoon, but they have no more intelligence than kittens. Imagine how fed up a man would get! And looks don't last. Though, apart from that, I'd grow weary to death of the inanity long before the looks were faded. I want more than either of them could give from my wife." "Well, I don't know," Macfarlane returned lazily, "that I'm so keen on matrimony. A man has a lot better time while he's single." "That's all very well," Matheson argued; "but the world can't be run on those lines. I mean to marry. I want to have a wife and children and some stake in the country." "You're going ahead a bit," Macfarlane laughed. "What's changed you? You weren't keen on responsibilities at one time... You are changed, Matheson. You've changed a lot during the last few months... A girl-- eh?"