life up to sixty without catching the contagion and then gets it horribly and marries his cook or a chorus girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Haven't you seen confirmed bachelors successfully resist the wiles of the most fascinating women and turn down a dozen suitable girls—and then, just when you thought they were quite safe and entirely past the chance of marriage as well as their first youth, turn around and tie[52] themselves to some little fool thing without a penny to her name or a thought worth half that amount? That was a late attack of the matrimonial fever—and the older you get it the harder it goes. Let me see," added the widow thoughtfully, "how old are you?"

[51]

[52]

"I haven't lost my ideals—nor my teeth!" declared the bachelor defensively.

"What is your ideal?" asked the widow leaning over and peeping up under the bachelor's hat brim.

The bachelor stared back at her through lowered lashes.

"It's got on a violet hat," he began, "and violet——"

"Is that a ship out there?" asked the widow, suddenly becoming interested in the sea.[53]

[53]

"And violet——"

"Oh, dear!" she interrupted petulantly. "Of course, you've got ideals. All men have ideals—but they don't often marry them. The trouble is that when a man has the marrying fever he can clothe anything in curls and petticoats with the illusions he has built around that ideal, and put the ideal's halo on her head and imagine she is the real thing. He can look at a red-headed, pug-nosed girl from an angle that will make her hair seem pure gold and her pug look Greek. By some mental feat, he can transform a girl six feet tall with no waist line and an acute elbow into a kittenish, plump little thing that he has always had in mind—and marry her. Or, if his ideal is tall and willowy and ethereal, and he happens to[54] meet a woman weighing 200 pounds whose first thought in the morning is her breakfast and whole last thought at night is her dinner, he will picture her merely attractively plump and a marvel of intellect and imagination. And," the widow sank her chin in her hand and gazed out to sea reflectively, "it is all so pitiful, 

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