nk I should capitulate; but they're
all dead. The type has changed, and I haven't changed with it."

* * * * *

Fergus Appleton did not make acquaintances easily; no man does who has
had a lonely, neglected boyhood, his only companion a father who
seldom remembered his existence, and, when he did, apparently
regretted it. He had known girls, but he was a shy, silent, ugly boy,
and appealed as little to them as they to him. He did not live through
the twenties without discovering that a fine crop of sentiment was
growing in his heart; he also discovered that he didn't know in the
least what to do with it. George Meredith, speaking of Romance, says:
"The young who avoid that region escape the title of Fool at the cost
of a Celestial crown." Fergus Appleton wouldn't have minded being
called a fool if only he could have contrived to deserve the title,
and the glimmer of the crown celestial had been in his imagination
more than once until he turned thirty and decided it was not for his
head. Guileless school-girls did not appeal to him, and elderly sirens
certainly had no power to charm; he was even widow-proof, so he became
a thoroughfare for sisterly affection. Girls suffocated him with
friendliness, which was not the stuff of which his dreams were made.

However, he had nothing to complain of, for he got as good as he gave,
and it occurred to him that he could not expect to start a disastrous
conflagration in any maiden bosom so long as he had no brimstone, nor
any substitute for it, on his own premises.

"Anyway," he reflected (though perhaps not oftener than once a year),
"if I haven't a tie in the world, I have complete freedom to do as I
like!" And if the said freedom palled upon him occasionally, nobody
was the wiser, for Fergus Appleton did not wear his heart on his
sleeve.

As for Tommy, there had been several Thomas Tuckers in genealogical
line, and the father of Thomasina was already Thomas Tucker the third.
Mr. and Mrs. Tucker, the parents of the first Thomas, must have been
somewhat lacking in humor, and somewhat ignorant of the classics, for
although they could not, perhaps, help being Tuckers, they needn't
have saddled their offspring with a Christian name which would suggest
Mother Goose to every properly educated person. However, the first
Thomas grew into a great man, healthy, wealthy, and wise, and his
descendants could hardly do less than keep his name aliv