ly perplexed about how to
tip the servants, how to pay if they lose at bridge, and so forth. We
enlist them, we send them out on demand, carefully selecting our agents
to meet the circumstances in each case. They go down and disentangle the
amorous by--well, by entangling them. The lovers are off with the old
love, the love which causes all the worry, without being on with the new
love--our agent. The thing quietly fizzles out.'

'Quietly!' Logan snorted. 'I like "quietly." They would be on with the
new love. Don't you see, you born gomeral, that the person, man or
woman, who deserts the inconvenient A.--I put an A. B. case--falls in
love with your agent B., and your B. is, by the nature of the thing, more
ineligible than A.--too poor. A babe could see that. You disappoint me,
Merton.'

'You state,' said Merton, 'one of the practical difficulties which I
foresaw. Not that it does not suit _us_ very well. Our comrade and
friend, man or woman, gets a chance of a good marriage, and, Logan, there
is no better thing. But parents and guardians would not stand much of
that: of people marrying our agents.'

'Of course they wouldn't. Your idea is crazy.'

'Wait a moment,' said Merton. 'The resources of science are not yet
exhausted. You have heard of the epoch-making discovery of Jenner, and
its beneficent results in checking the ravages of smallpox, that scourge
of the human race?'

'Oh don't talk like a printed book,' Logan remonstrated. 'Everybody has
heard of vaccination.'

'And you are aware that similar prophylactic measures have been adopted,
with more or less of success, in the case of other diseases?'

'I am aware,' said Logan, 'that you are in danger of personal suffering
at my hands, as I already warned you.'

'What is love but a disease?' Merton asked dreamily. 'A French _savant_,
Monsieur Janet, says that nobody ever falls in love except when he is a
little bit off colour: I forget the French equivalent.'

'I am coming for you,' Logan arose in wrath.

'Sit down. Well, your objection (which it did not need the eyes of an
Argus to discover) is that the patients, the lovers young, whose loves
are disapproved of by the family, will fall in love with our agents,
insist on marrying _them_, and so the last state of these afflicted
parents--or children--will be worse than the first. Is that your
objection?'

'Of course it is; and crushing at that,' Logan replied.

'Then science suggests pro