ordinary myself----"

"What!" cried Cuthbert. "You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among
women, the queen of your sex. You can't have been looking in a glass
lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like
battered repaints."

"Well," said Adeline, softening a trifle, "I believe I am fairly
good-looking----"

"Anybody who was content to call you fairly good-looking would describe
the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb."

"But that is not the point. What I mean is, if I marry a nonentity I
shall be a nonentity myself for ever. And I would sooner die than be a
nonentity."

"And, if I follow your reasoning, you think that that lets _me_
out?"

"Well, really, Mr. Banks, _have_ you done anything, or are you
likely ever to do anything worth while?"

Cuthbert hesitated.

"It's true," he said, "I didn't finish in the first ten in the Open,
and I was knocked out in the semi-final of the Amateur, but I won the
French Open last year."

"The--what?"