han to ride abroad with a blue ribbon fastened to the point of his
lance, and with the spirit to unhorse any one who objected to its
color, or to the claims of superiority of the noble lady who had tied
it there. There was not, in his opinion, at the present day any
sufficiently pronounced method of declaring admiration for the many
lovely women this world contained. A proposal of marriage he
considered to be a mean and clumsy substitute for the older way, and
was uncomplimentary to the many other women left unasked, and marriage
itself required much more constancy than he could give. He had a most
romantic and old-fashioned ideal of women as a class, and from the age
of fourteen had been a devotee of hundreds of them as individuals; and
though in that time his ideal had received several severe shocks, he
still believed that the "not impossible she" existed somewhere, and his
conscientious efforts to find out whether every women he met might not
be that one had led him not unnaturally into many difficulties.

"The trouble with me is," he said, "that I care too much to make
Platonic friendship possible, and don't care enough to marry any
particular woman--that is, of course, supposing that any particular one
would be so little particular as to be willing to marry me. How
embarrassing it would be, now," he argued, "if, when you were turning
away from the chancel after the ceremony, you should look at one of the
bridesmaids and see the woman whom you really should have married! How
distressing that would be! You couldn't very well stop and say: 'I am
very sorry, my dear, but it seems I have made a mistake. That young
woman on the right has a most interesting and beautiful face. I am
very much afraid that she is the one.' It would be too late then;
while now, in my free state, I can continue my search without any
sense of responsibility."

"Why"--he would exclaim--"I have walked miles to get a glimpse of a
beautiful woman in a suburban window, and time and time again when I
have seen a face in a passing brougham I have pursued it in a hansom,
and learned where the owner of the face lived, and spent weeks in
finding some one to present me, only to discover that she was
self-conscious or uninteresting or engaged. Still I had assured myself
that she was not the one. I am very conscientious, and I consider that
it is my duty to go so far with every woman I meet as to be able to
learn whether she is or is not the one