p. 8

‘Unless what?’ said Logan.

‘Practical difficulties,’ said Merton, ‘will occur in every enterprise. But they won’t be to our disadvantage, the reverse—if they don’t happen too often. And we can guard against that by a scientific process.’

‘Now will you explain,’ Logan asked, ‘or shall I pour this whisky and water down the back of your neck?’

He rose to his feet, menace in his eye.

‘Bear fighting barred! We are no longer boys. We are men—broken men. Sit down, don’t play the bear,’ said Merton.

‘Well, explain, or I fire!’

‘Don’t you see? The problem for the family, for hundreds of families, is to get the undesirable marriage off without the usual row. Very few people really like a row. Daughter becomes anæmic; foreign cures are expensive and no good. Son goes to the Devil or the Cape. Aged and opulent, but amorous, parent leaves everything he can scrape together to disapproved of new wife. Relations cut each other all round. Not many people really enjoy that kind of thing. They want a pacific solution—marriage off, no remonstrances.’

‘And how are you going to do it?’

‘Why,’ said Merton, ‘by a scientific and thoroughly organised system of disengaging or disentangling. p. 9We enlist a lot of girls and fellows like ourselves, beautiful, attractive, young, or not so young, well connected, intellectual, athletic, and of all sorts of types, but all broke, all without visible means of subsistence. They are people welcome in country houses, but travelling third class, and devilishly perplexed about how to tip the servants, how to pay if they lose at bridge, and so forth. We enlist them, we send them out on demand, carefully selecting our agents to meet the circumstances in each case. They go down and disentangle the amorous by—well, by entangling them. The lovers are off with the old love, the love which causes all the worry, without being on with the new love—our agent. The thing quietly fizzles out.’

p. 9

‘Quietly!’ Logan snorted. ‘I like “quietly.” They would be on with the new love. Don’t you see, you born gomeral, that the person, man or woman, who deserts the inconvenient A.—I put an A. B. case—falls in love with your agent B., and your B. is, by the nature of 

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