k about it. Now
the trouble in our country is that people marry for love, and when they
get through loving they have got to live, and then somebody must pay the
bills. Supposing the son of one rich father marries the daughter of
another rich father; by the time they have got rid of the novelty of the
thing the bills begin to come in, and they spend the remainder of their
amiable lives in trying to shove the expense off on to each other. With
an old-fashioned marriage contract to tie them up, that would not
happen, because the wife is bound to provide so many clothes, and the
husband has to give her just so much to eat, and there is an end of it.
See?"

"No, I do not see," returned Claudius. "If they really loved each
other--"

"Get out!" interrupted Barker, merrily. "If you mean to take the
immutability of the human affections as a basis of argument, I have
done."

"There your cynicism comes in," said the other, "and denies you the
pleasure and profit of contemplating an ideal, and of following it up
to its full development."

"Is it cynical to see things as they are instead of as they might be in
an imaginary world?"

"Provided you really see them as they are--no," said Claudius. "But if
you begin with an idea that things, as they are, are not very good, you
will very soon be judging them by your own inherent standard of badness,
and you will produce a bad ideal as I produce a good one, farther still
from the truth, and extremely depressing to contemplate."

"Why?" retorted Barker; "why should it be depressing to look at
everything as it is, or to try to? Why should my naturally gay
disposition suffer on making the discovery that the millennium is not
begun yet? The world may be bad, but it is a merry little place while it
lasts."

"You are a hopeless case," said Claudius, laughing; "if you had a
conscience and some little feeling for humanity, you would feel
uncomfortable in a bad world."

"Exactly. I am moderately comfortable because I know that I am just like
everybody else. I would rather, I am sure."

"I am not sure that you are," said Claudius thoughtfully.

"Oh! not as you imagine everybody else, certainly. Medieval persons who
have a hankering after tournaments and crawl about worshipping women."

"I do not deny the softer impeachment," answered the Doctor, "but I
hardly think I crawl much."

"No, but the people you imagine do--the male population of this merry
globe, as you represent it to the