To conclude, a summary.  The woman you choose should be plain, as plain as you can find, as old or older than yourself, devoid of social gifts or accomplishments, poor—­for your self-respect—­and with a certain amiable untidiness.  Of course no young man will heed this, but at least I have given my counsel, and very excellent reasons for that counsel.  And possibly I shall be able to remind him that I told him as much, in the course of a few years’ time.  And, by the bye, I had almost forgotten!  Never by any chance marry a girl whose dresses do up at the back, unless you can afford her a maid or so of her own.

THE HOUSE OF DI SORNO

A MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN A BOX

And the box, Euphemia’s.  Brutally raided it was by an insensate husband, eager for a tie and too unreasonably impatient to wait an hour or so until she could get home and find it for him.  There was, of course, no tie at all in that box, for all his stirring—­as anyone might have known; but, if there was no tie, there were certain papers that at least suggested a possibility of whiling away the time until the Chooser and Distributer of Ties should return.  And, after all, there is no reading like your accidental reading come upon unawares.

It was a discovery, indeed, that Euphemia had papers.  At the first glance these close-written sheets suggested a treasonable Keynote, and the husband gripped it with a certain apprehension mingling with his relief at the opiate of reading.  It was, so to speak, the privilege of police he exercised, so he justified himself.  He began to read.  But what is this?  “She stood on the balcony outside the window, while the noblest-born in the palace waited on her every capricious glance, and watched for an unbending look to relieve her hauteur, but in vain.”  None of your snippy-snappy Keynote there!

Then he turned over a page or so of the copy, doubting if the privilege of police still held good.  Standing out by virtue of a different ink, and coming immediately after “bear her to her proud father,” were the words, “How many yards of carpet 3/4 yds. wide will cover room, width 16 ft., length 27-1/2 ft.?” Then he knew he was in the presence of the great romance that Euphemia wrote when she was sixteen.  He had heard something of it before.  He held it doubtfully in his hands, for the question of conscience still troubled him.  “Bah!” he said abruptly, “not to find it irresistible was to slight the authoress and her skill.”  And with that he sat plump down among the things in the box very comfortably and began reading, and, indeed, read until Euphemia arrived.  But she, at the sight of his head and legs, made several fragmentary and presumably offensive remarks about crushing some hat or other, and proceeded with needless violence to get him out of the box again.  However, that is my own private trouble.  We are concerned now with the merits of Euphemia’s romance.