nswered my silver-haired friend;
"it is the system that I am defending. A young girl is no judge of
character. She is easily deceived, is wishful to be deceived. As I have
said, she does not even know herself. She imagines the mood of the
moment will remain with her. Only those who have watched over her with
loving insight from her infancy know her real temperament.

"The young man is blinded by his passion. Nature knows nothing of
marriage, of companionship. She has only one aim. That accomplished,
she is indifferent to the future of those she has joined together. I
would have parents think only of their children's happiness, giving to
worldly considerations their true value, but nothing beyond, choosing for
their children with loving care, with sense of their great
responsibility."

Which is it?

"I fear our young people would not be contented with our choosing," I
suggested.

"Are they so contented with their own, the honeymoon over?" she responded
with a smile.

We agreed it was a difficult problem viewed from any point.

But I still think it would be better were we to heap less ridicule upon
the institution. Matrimony cannot be "holy" and ridiculous at the same
time. We have been familiar with it long enough to make up our minds in
which light to regard it.

CHAPTER XIX

Man and his Tailor.

What's wrong with the "Made-up Tie"? I gather from the fashionable
novelist that no man can wear a made-up tie and be a gentleman. He may
be a worthy man, clever, well-to-do, eligible from every other point of
view; but She, the refined heroine, can never get over the fact that he
wears a made-up tie. It causes a shudder down her high-bred spine
whenever she thinks of it. There is nothing else to be said against him.
There is nothing worse about him than this--he wears a made-up tie. It
is all sufficient. No true woman could ever care for him, no really
classy society ever open its doors to him.

I am worried about this thing because, to confess the horrid truth, I
wear a made-up tie myself. On foggy afternoons I steal out of the house
disguised. They ask me where I am going in a hat that comes down over my
ears, and why I am wearing blue spectacles and a false beard, but I will
not tell them. I creep along the wall till I find a common hosier's
shop, and then, in an assumed voice, I tell the man what it is I want.
They come to fourpence halfpenny each; by taking the half-dozen I