'And how are you going to do it?'

'Why,' said Merton, 'by a scientific and thoroughly organised system of
disengaging or disentangling. We enlist a lot of girls and fellows like
ourselves, beautiful, attractive, young, or not so young, well connected,
intellectual, athletic, and of all sorts of types, but all _broke_, all
without visible means of subsistence. They are people welcome in country
houses, but travelling third class, and devilishly perplexed about how to
tip the servants, how to pay if they lose at bridge, and so forth. We
enlist them, we send them out on demand, carefully selecting our agents
to meet the circumstances in each case. They go down and disentangle the
amorous by--well, by entangling them. The lovers are off with the old
love, the love which causes all the worry, without being on with the new
love--our agent. The thing quietly fizzles out.'

'Quietly!' Logan snorted. 'I like "quietly." They would be on with the
new love. Don't you see, you born gomeral, that the person, man or
woman, who deserts the inconvenient A.--I put an A. B. case--falls in
love with your agent B., and your B. is, by the nature of the thing, more
ineligible than A.--too poor. A babe could see that. You disappoint me,
Merton.'

'You state,' said Merton, 'one of the practical difficulties which I
foresaw. Not that it does not suit _us_ very well. Our comrade and
friend, man or woman, gets a chance of a good marriage, and, Logan, there
is no better thing. But parents and guardians would not stand much of
that: of people marrying our agents.'

'Of course they wouldn't. Your idea is crazy.'