busy and successful persons who, by reason of having married early and
unwisely, are strangers to the delights of that higher social intercourse
chronicled in novels and the public prints. If one may conveniently
overlook the joys of a companionship of the soul, it is quite as possible
to have a taste in women as in champagne or cigars. Mr. Ditmar preferred
blondes, and he liked them rather stout, a predilection that had led him
into matrimony with a lady of this description: a somewhat sticky,
candy-eating lady with a mania for card parties, who undoubtedly would
have dyed her hair if she had lived. He was not inconsolable, but he had
had enough of marriage to learn that it demands a somewhat exorbitant
price for joys otherwise more reasonably to be obtained.

He was left a widower with two children, a girl of thirteen and a boy of
twelve, both somewhat large for their ages. Amy attended the only private
institution for the instruction of her sex of which Hampton could boast;
George continued at a public school. The late Mrs. Ditmar for some years
before her demise had begun to give evidence of certain restless
aspirations to which American ladies of her type and situation seem
peculiarly liable, and with a view to their ultimate realization she had
inaugurated a Jericho-like campaign. Death had released Ditmar from its
increasing pressure. For his wife had possessed that admirable substitute
for character, persistence, had been expert in the use of importunity,
often an efficient weapon in the hands of the female economically
dependent. The daughter of a defunct cashier of the Hampton National
Bank, when she had married Ditmar, then one of the superintendents of the
Chippering and already a marked man, she had deemed herself fortunate
among women, looking forward to a life of ease and idleness and candy in
great abundance,--a dream temporarily shattered by the unforeseen
discomfort of bringing two children into the world, with an interval of
scarcely a year between them. Her parents from an excess of native