"What," he demanded, "are the marks by which you are to know a 'strong
man'--in the feminine picture? A strong man, of course, is a man with
the bark on; polish is incompatible with rugged strength. An
exhilarating air of brusqueness breathes from all strong men. They are
as ignorant of manners as they are of the effete conventions of
grammar. They have fought their way up, and no one can down them.
They can be depended upon absolutely as what are called 'good
providers.' In short, by the written confession of her heart, woman's
idea of a 'dear,' after several centuries more or less of civilisation,
remains precisely the primitive conception that it was in the days when
man wooed her by grabbing her by the hair and handing her one with a
club."

The Colonel was breathing heavily with the exertion of animated speech
as he added: "In real life a man of any stability of judgment would be
decidedly suspicious of the hero of a modern woman's novel if one
should walk into his office, or, doubtless, he would observe this
whimsical caricature with something of the amusement he would find in
the ludicrously false comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage. This
irreverent flight of fancy on our part, however, is yanking the strong
man from his appropriate and supporting setting, where paste is given
the glow of an authentic stone; in the sympathetic pages created by
feminine intuition he dominates the machine. When the heroine takes
into her own hands the right of the individual to a second chance for
happiness," the Colonel declaimed with a demoniac grin, "she turns to
experience with such a one perfect love, as the honoured wife of a
splendid and prosperous man and the mother of beautiful children.

"The ethics of that engrossing theme of divorce," the Colonel went on,
lighting another corpulent and very black cigar, "as decided by the