Logan insisted.

'To help us in supplying the widely felt want, which is my discovery,'
said Merton.

'And that is?'

'Disentanglers--of both sexes. A large and varied staff, calculated to
meet every requirement and cope with every circumstance.' Merton quoted
an unwritten prospectus.

'I don't follow. What the deuce is your felt want?'

'What we were talking about.'

'Ground bait for salmon?' Logan reverted to his idea.

'No. Family rows about marriages. Nasty letters. Refusals to recognise
the choice of a son, a daughter, or a widowed but youthful old parent,
among the upper classes. Harsh words. Refusals to allow meetings or
correspondence. Broken hearts. Improvident marriages. Preaching down a
daughter's heart, or an aged parent's heart, or a nephew's, or a niece's,
or a ward's, or anybody's heart. Peace restored to the household.
Intended marriage off, and nobody a penny the worse, unless--'

'Unless what?' said Logan.

'Practical difficulties,' said Merton, 'will occur in every enterprise.
But they won't be to our disadvantage, the reverse--if they don't happen
too often. And we can guard against _that_ by a scientific process.'

'Now will you explain,' Logan asked, 'or shall I pour this whisky and
water down the back of your neck?'

He rose to his feet, menace in his eye.

'Bear fighting barred! We are no longer boys. We are men--broken men.
Sit down, don't play the bear,' said Merton.

'Well, explain, or I fire!'

'Don't you see? The problem for the family, for hundreds of families, is
to get the undesirable marriage off without the usual row. Very few
people really like a row. Daughter becomes anaemic; foreign cures are
expensive and no good. Son goes to the Devil or the Cape. Aged and
opulent, but amorous, parent leaves everything he can scrape together to
disapproved of new wife. Relations cut each other all round. Not many
people really enjoy that kind of thing. They want a pacific
solution--marriage off, no remonstrances.'

'And how are you going to do it?'

'Why,' said Merton, 'by a scientific and thoroughly organised system of
disengaging or disentangling. We enlist a lot of girls and fellows like
ourselves, beautiful, attractive, young, or not so young, well connected,
intellectual, athletic, and of all sorts of types, but all _broke_, all
without visible means of subsistence. They are people welcome in country
houses, but travelling third class, and devilish