ion, I might yet seek a beauty
doctor and obtain the glazed surface so essential to social success.
Bachelorhood with Jim seemed to have been due to his lack of
appreciation of others, for according to the favorable comment his
comely appearance created, he seemed to be filled with indifference;
while with me, as I warmed into high enthusiasm over certain
well-defined representatives of the angelic sex, coolness, growing to
statuesque frigidity, would develop in the object of my devotions, and
the beauty whose charms had bedeviled me into insomnia and wild-eyed
desperation became related to me thereafter as the angel surmounting the
tombstone that marked the resting place of my folly.

Moderation, therefore, I concluded, was the keynote of success in
courtship. When the current became balanced in negative and positive
qualities, the desirable equilibrium recognized by each pole as the real
thrill of mutual romance, jealousy and despair would spark, blow out the
fuse and short-circuit into a proposal and an acceptance. Jim was
negative in desire and positive in appearance, thus securing neutrality,
and my passive state was the resultant of a positive inclination and a
negative exterior. Thus Jim was admired and I was tolerated, but he had
progressed no further than I.

One Sunday he and I were strolling through an art gallery.

"What do you call this, Ben?" he whispered behind his hand, pointing to
the portrait of a red-haired Diana sitting on a low, mossy stump in a
lonely spot. Her back was turned toward us, and she seemed to be taking
a sun bath. He looked stealthily around to make sure his curiosity was
not noted by the spectators near us.

"It says on the label that Titty Ann painted it. It is the
bluest-looking woman I ever saw; how did they come to let it in?"

"Yes," said I, not attempting to disturb his view of the painting or the
name of the artist, "Titty Ann was a great painter of the blue-blooded
women of the aristocracy, so blue-blooded they seemed to be bruised all
over, and Titty Ann wanted you to see there was no place they had not
been hurt."

The incident shows how keen was Jim's appreciation of this great subject
of universal interest to bachelors. It seemed to me in those days that
the fairest creature that ever fluttered could not charm him with the
siren whistle of her swishing silk, nor throw a damaging spark from her
bright eyes. But here he was, plunged into the most dreadful
complication