the marriage mart. Men and women who enter therein with only sense
in their purse have no right to complain if, on reaching home, they
find they have concluded an unsatisfactory bargain.

John Ingerfield, when he asked Anne Singleton to be his wife, felt no
more love for her than he felt for any of the other sumptuous
household appointments he was purchasing about the same time, and
made no pretence of doing so. Nor, had he done so, would she have
believed him; for Anne Singleton has learned much in her twenty-two
summers and winters, and knows that love is only a meteor in life's
sky, and that the true lodestar of this world is gold. Anne
Singleton has had her romance and buried it deep down in her deep
nature and over its grave, to keep its ghost from rising, has piled
the stones of indifference and contempt, as many a woman has done
before and since. Once upon a time Anne Singleton sat dreaming out a
story. It was a story old as the hills--older than some of them--but
to her, then, it was quite new and very wonderful. It contained all
the usual stock material common to such stories: the lad and the
lass, the plighted troth, the richer suitors, the angry parents, the
love that was worth braving all the world for. One day into this
dream there fell from the land of the waking a letter, a poor,
pitiful letter: "You know I love you and only you," it ran; "my
heart will always be yours till I die. But my father threatens to
stop my allowance, and, as you know, I have nothing of my own except
debts. Some would call her handsome, but how can I think of her
beside you? Oh, why was money ever let to come into the world to
curse us?" with many other puzzling questions of a like character,
and much severe condemnation of Fate and Heaven and other parties
generally, and much self-commiseration.