depleted Miss Davis' once lengthy list. And she, herself, was five
years older. It would be interesting, and perhaps instructive, to
see the young person from nowhere who had still further narrowed her
personal territory.

"It does seem rather a shame," she confided to a select friend or
two, "that clever men who have escaped the perils of early matrimony
should in maturity turn back to the very thing which constituted
that peril."

"You mean men like them young?" said a select friend with brutal
candor.

"I mean they like them too young. In the case I'm thinking of, the
girl is a mere child. And quite uncultured. What possibility of
intellectual companionship could the most sanguine man expect?"

"None. But they don't want intellectual companionship." Another
select friend spoke bitterly. "I used to think they did. It seemed
reasonable. As the basis for a whole lifetime, it seemed the only
possible thing. But what's the use of insisting on a theory, no
matter how abstractly sound, if it is disproved in practice every
day? Remember Bobby Wells? He is quite famous now; knows more about
biology than any man on this side of the water. He married last
week. His wife is a pretty little creature who thinks protoplasm
another name for appendicitis."

There was a sympathetic pause.

"And biology was always such a fad of yours," sighed Mary