"SAY--Aleck?"

The interrupting words brought her suddenly to herself. She was
grateful to have that persecuting subject from her thoughts,
and she answered, with much of the old-time tenderness in her tone:

"Yes, dear."

"Do you know, Aleck, I think we are making a mistake--that is,
you are. I mean about the marriage business." He sat up, fat and
froggy and benevolent, like a bronze Buddha, and grew earnest.
"Consider--it's more than five years. You've continued the same
policy from the start: with every rise, always holding on for five
points higher. Always when I think we are going to have some weddings,
you see a bigger thing ahead, and I undergo another disappointment.
_I_ think you are too hard to please. Some day we'll get left.
First, we turned down the dentist and the lawyer. That was all right
--it was sound. Next, we turned down the banker's son and the
pork-butcher's heir--right again, and sound. Next, we turned
down the Congressman's son and the Governor's--right as a trivet,
I confess it. Next the Senator's son and the son of the Vice-President
of the United States--perfectly right, there's no permanency about
those little distinctions. Then you went for the aristocracy;
and I thought we had struck oil at last--yes. We would make
a plunge at the Four Hundred, and pull in some ancient lineage,
venerable, holy, ineffable, mellow with the antiquity of a hundred
and fifty years, disinfected of the ancestral odors of salt-cod
and pelts all of a century ago, and unsmirched by a day's work since,
and then! why, then the marriages, of course. But no, along comes