when Rennert's in more primitive quarters had been the Mecca for
epicureans. He had known its theaters when the footlight favorites were
Lotta and Jo Emmet, and when the incomparable Booth and Jefferson had
held audiences spellbound at Ford's and at Albaugh's. He had known
Charles Street before it was extended, and he had known its Sunday
parade. He had known the Bay Line Boats, the harbor and the noisy streets
that led to the wharves. He had known Lexington Market on Saturday
afternoons; the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the heyday of its
importance, and more than all he had known the beauties and belles of old
Baltimore, and it added piquancy to many of his anecdotes when he spoke
of his single estate as a tragedy resulting from his devotion to too many
charmers, with no possibility of making a choice.

It was of these things that he spoke while Geoffrey, lying in the grass
with his arm across his eyes, listened and enjoyed.

"And you never married, sir?"

"I've told you there were too many of them. If I could have had any one
of those girls on this island with 'tother dear charmers away, there
wouldn't have been any trouble. But a choice with them all about me
was--impossible." His old eyes twinkled.

"Suppose you had made a choice, and she hadn't cared for you?" said the
voice of the man on the grass.

"Any woman will care if you go at it the right way."

"What is the right way?"

"There's only one way to win a woman. If she says she won't marry you,
carry her off by force to a clergyman, and when you get her there make
her say 'Yes.'"

Geoffrey sat up. "You don't mean that literally?"

Brinsley nodded. "Indeed I do. Take the attitude with them of Man the
Conqueror. They all like it. Man the Suppliant never gets what he wants."

"But in these days primitive methods aren't possible."

Brinsley skipped a chicken bone expertly across the surface of the water.
"Primitive methods are always possible. The trouble is that man has lost
his nerve. The cult of chivalry has spoiled him. It has taught him to
kneel at his lady's feet, where pre-historically he kept his foot on her
neck!"

Geoffrey laughed. "You'd be mobbed in a suffrage meeting."

"Suffrage, my dear fellow, is the green carnation in the garden of
femininity. Every woman blooms for her lover. It is the lack of lovers
that produces the artificial--hence votes for women. What does the woman
being carried off under the arm of conquering man care for