ke his shadow. Then, when he is
fairly caught in the toils of her encircling sympathy, the elder and
more experienced ally appears on the scene. Her task is to cut off his
retreat. Upon her firmness and accuracy in calculating the resisting
power of her pigeon, success depends. Seizing an opportunity when he is
least prepared, she sternly informs him that the time for dalliance is
over, that he has said and done things of a very marked kind, and that
there is only one course open to him as a pigeon of honor. And under
this sort of compulsion the simple creature, with his rent-roll,
Consols, family diamonds, and all, hops with a fairly good grace into
the matrimonial toils.

The second contrivance to which he is apt to fall a victim is the
infatuation trap. This is a much more elaborate machine, and is worked
by one of those semi-attached couples who might sit to a new Hogarth for
a new edition of _Marriage a la Mode_. The husband's part is very
simple. It is to be as little in the way as possible, and to afford his
sprightlier half every facility for pursuing her little game. The chief
business devolves on the lady. It is her task to make the pigeon fall
madly in love with her, and to keep him so, without overstepping the
bounds of conventional propriety. Happily this can be managed nowadays
without either elopement or scandal. Among the improvements of this
mechanical age, it has been found possible to enlarge the limits of
wedlock so as to include a third person.

A life-long _tete-a-tete_, which was the old conception of marriage, is
quite obsolete. It has given way to the triangular theory, by which a
new element, in the shape of a parasitical adorer, has been introduced
into the holy state. Matrimony, as reconstituted by fashionable
scholiasts, comprises husband, wife, and, to relieve the tedium of the
situation, a good-looking appendage of the male sex, who is an agreeable
companion of the one and the devoted slave of the other. Each
contributes to the harmony of the arrangement--the husband, a
background; the wife, the charms of her presence; the adorer, cash.
Whatever other experience it brings, marriage generally sharpens the
appreciation of the value of money; sentiment is sweet, but it is an
article of confectionery, for which its fair dispensers in the married
ranks exact an equivalent.

In trapping her victim, therefore, a sharp young matron is careful to
let her choice fall on a plump specimen of the pi