Miss Patterson, on the other hand, represented to the fullest degree the intellectual standard Mr. Augustus Richards had set up for the winner of his affections.  She was fond of poetry and of music.  She was a student of letters, and a clever talker on almost all the arts and sciences in which Mr. Augustus Richards delighted.  But, alas! physically she was not what he could admire.  She was small and insignificant in appearance.  She was pallid-faced, and, it must be confessed, extremely scant of locks; and the idea of marrying her was to Mr. Augustus Richards little short of preposterous.  Others, there were, too, who attracted him in some measure, but who likewise repelled him in equal, if not greater measure.

What he wanted Mrs. Augustus Richards to be was a composite of the best in the beautiful Miss Fotheringay, the intellectual Miss Patterson, the comfortably rich but extremely loud Miss Barrows, with a dash of the virtues of all the others thrown in.

For years he looked for such a one, but season after season passed away and the ideal failed to materialize, as unfortunately most ideals have a way of doing, and hither and yon Mr. Augustus Richards went unmarried, and, as society said, a hopelessly confirmed old bachelor—­more’s the pity.

II

MISS HENDERSON’S STANDARD

Miss Flora Henderson was born and bred in Boston, and, like Mr. Augustus Richards, had reached the age of thirty without having yielded to the allurements of matrimony.  This was not because she had not had the opportunity, for opportunity she had had in greatest measure.  She made her first appearance in society at the age of seventeen, and for every year since that interesting occasion she had averaged four proposals of marriage; and how many proposals that involved, every person who can multiply thirteen by four can easily discover.  Society said she was stuck up, but she knew she wasn’t.  She did not reject men for the mere love of it.  It was not vanity that led her to say no to so many adoring swains; it was simply the fact that not one in all the great number of would-be protectors represented her notions as to the style of man with whom she could be so happy that she would undertake the task of making him so.

Miles Dawson, for instance, was the kind of man that any ordinary girl would have snapped up the moment he declared himself.  He had three safe-deposit boxes in town, and there was evidence in sight that he did not rent them for the purpose of keeping cigars in them.  He had several horses and carriages.  He was a regular attendant upon all the social functions of the season, and at many of them he appeared to enjoy himself hugely.  At the musicals and purely literary entertainments, however, Miles Dawson always looked, as he was, extremely bored.  Once Miss Henderson had seen him yawn at a Shelley reading.  He was, in short, of the earth earthy, or perhaps, to be more