efore a tray heaped with
letters, answers to his advertisement:

"Housekeeper wanted. Must be middle-aged. The older the better.
Salary, L500 a year."

Not much, he had thought, L500 a year--if, by paying it, he might win a
wife who would entitle him to an annual L15,000, whose declining years
he might kindly cheer, and whose death would set him free to marry a
wife whom he could love. His fancy drifted pleasantly towards Sylvia.

Michael was a lazy man, who bristled with business instincts. He
telephoned to the nearest "typewriters' association" for a secretary,
and to this young woman he committed the charge of answering the letters
which his advertisement had drawn forth. The answer was to be the same
to all:

"Call at 17 Hare Court, Temple, between 11 and 1."

And the dates fixed for such calling were arranged to allow about fifty
interviews daily for the next week or two, for Michael was a bold man as
well as a lazy one. The next morning, faultlessly dressed, with
carnations in his buttonhole, he composed himself in his pleasant
oak-furnished room to await his first batch of callers.

They came. And Michael, strong in his unswerving determination not to
forfeit his chance of inheriting the L15,000 a year left him under his
mad uncle's mad will, saw them all, one after the other.

But he did not like any of them. They were old; that he did not mind--it
was, indeed, of the essence of the contract. But they were frowsy, too,
with reticules of scarred brownish leather, and mangy fur trimmings,
worn fringes, and beaded mantles, whence time and poverty had clawed
handfuls of the bright beads. Each of them was, as a wife, even as a
wife in name, impossible. The task of rejection was softened to his hand
by the fact that not one of them could boast the necessary hundred a
year in Consols.

The interviews over, Michael, his spirit crushed by the spectacle of so
many women anxious to find a refuge at an age when their children and
grandchildren should, in their own homes, have been rising up to call
them blessed, went to lounge a restorative hour in Sylvia's bright
little studio, and laugh with her over his dilemma. He would have liked
to sigh with her, too, but the pathos of the homeless old women escaped
her. She saw only the humour of the situation.

"There's no harm done, if it amuses you," she said, "but you'll never
marry an old woman."

"Fifteen thousand pounds a year," said Michael softly.