aimed Langdon. "Shall I try? Trust me to come back a
specimen of sickening symmetry--the kind of man women write about and
draw pictures of--pink and white and silky-whiskered! Shall I? And I'll
bring you a net to catch her in! Is it a go, William?"

Sayre broke down and began to cry.

"Heaven bless you, friend," he sobbed. "And if ever I get that girl
inside a net she'll learn something about natural selection that they
p-p-probably forgot to teach in their accursed New Race University!"

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

V

ONE week later Curtis Langdon sat on the banks of a trout stream fishing,
apparently deeply absorbed in his business; but he was listening so hard
that his ears hurt him.

A few yards away, ambushed behind a rock on which was painted "Votes for
Women," lurked William Sayre. A net lay on the ground beside him,
fashioned with ring and detachable handle like a gigantic butterfly net.

He, too, tremendously excited, was listening and watching the human
bait--Langdon being cast for the bait.

Perfect and nauseating beauty now marked that young gentleman. Features
and figure were symmetrical; his eyebrows had been pencilled into exact
arcs, his mouth was a Cupid's bow, his cheeks were softly rosy, and a
silky and sickly moustache shadowed his rosy lips. Under his fashionable
outing shirt he wore a rubber chest improver; his cunningly padded
shoulders recalled the exquisite sartorial creations of Mart, Haffner,
and Sharx; his patent puttees gave him a calf to which his personal
shanks had never aspired; thick, golden-brown hair, false as a woman's
vows, was tossed carelessly from a brow, snowy with pearl powder. And he
wore a lilac-edged handkerchief in his left cuff.

Both young men truly felt that if any undergraduate of the New Race
University was out stalking she'd have at least one try at such a bait.
Nothing feminine and earnest could resist that glutinous agglomeration of
charms.

But they had now been there since before dawn; nothing had broken the
sun-lit quiet of forest and water, not even a trout; and they listened
in vain for the snapping of the classical twig.

Lunch time came; they ate a pad apiece. Neither dared to smoke, Sayre
because it might reveal his hiding place, Langdon because smoking might
be considered an imperfection in the University.

Sunlight fell warm on the banks of the stream, the leaves rustled, big
white clouds floated in the blue above. Nothing came