courtship and come to the moment when—at the annual ball in aid of the local Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the lion, so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the Cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences temporarily laid aside—he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.     

       That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spy-glass.     

       "Mr. Banks," she said, "I will speak frankly."     

       "Charge right ahead," assented Cuthbert.     

       "Deeply sensible as I am of——"     

       "I know. Of the honour and the compliment and all that. But, passing lightly over all that guff, what seems to be the trouble? I love you to distraction——"     

       "Love is not everything."     

       "You're wrong," said Cuthbert, earnestly. "You're right off it. Love——"       And he was about to dilate on the theme when she interrupted him.     

       "I am a girl of ambition."     

       "And very nice, too," said Cuthbert.     

       "I am a girl of ambition," repeated Adeline, "and I realize that the fulfilment of my ambitions must come through my husband. I am very ordinary myself——"     

       "What!" cried Cuthbert. "You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among women, the queen of your sex. You can't have been looking in a glass lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like battered repaints."     

       "Well," said Adeline, softening a trifle, "I believe I am fairly good-looking——"     

       "Anybody who was content to call you fairly good-looking would describe the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb."     

       "But that is not the point. What I mean is, if I marry a nonentity I shall be a nonentity myself for ever. And I would sooner die than be a nonentity."     

       "And, if I follow your reasoning, you think that that lets me out?"     

       "Well, really, Mr. Banks, have you done 

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