becoming a recalcitrant and sour old maid. Will, a healthy and
normal young man, with no bad habits, was in danger of being driven
to them by the emptiness and exasperation of his mind. The worst
of it all was that both of the young people were, in accordance
with a well-known law of nature, growing older with what seemed
to them a frightful and unreasonable rapidity. The years crawled
like snails. But the sum of them rose by leaps and bounds to an
appalling total. Alice found two grey hairs in her red-gold locks.
Will had to use glasses for reading fine print at night. From
their point of view, decrepitude, senility, dotage stared them in
the face, while the bright voyage of life which they were resolved
to make only together, was threatened with shipwreck among the
shoals of interminable delay.

It was at this juncture of affairs that they came to me, as fine-looking
a young couple as ever I saw. They were good, as mortals go; they
were loyal and upright, they wanted no scandal, no rumpus in the
family, no trouble or pain for anybody else; but they wanted to
belong to each other much more than they wanted to belong to any
class, artistic, proletarian, or capitalist. And they were desperate
because of the pertinacity of the Obstacle, whom they both respected
fully as much as he deserved.

When they had stated their case, I made my answer.

"So far as I can see, the salvage of your ship of love depends
entirely on yourselves. Mr. Hermann is not after a fortune, he
only wants his girl; is that so? [Hermann nodded vigorously.] And
Miss Mackaye does not care about being supported in the manner of
living to which she has been accustomed; she only wants to live