tive and a stimulant!" jeered the widow. "One to stir you up and
one to calm you down; one to spur you forward and one to pull on the
curb--a Hebe and a Minerva! And then you'd be running around demanding a
Venus to make you forget the other two. Whatever woman a man marries, he
invariably spends his life sighing for something different. If he is
tied to a nice, soft sofa pillow, he longs for a backbone. If he marries
a parlor ornament, he yearns for a kitchen utensil. If his wife has a
Greek nose, he discovers afterward that what he really admires is pugs.
If he picks out red hair or black, he will go blocks out of his way to
pursue every yellow glint that catches his eye. And if he married a
whole harem at once he would discover that what he really wanted was
monogamy, and a single wife with a single idea. There aren't enough
kinds of women in the world to fulfill any one man's idea of what a wife
should be."

"And yet," sighed the bachelor, "I once knew a woman who would have done
that--all by herself."

The widow looked unconvinced.

"Was she a model wife?" she inquired, skeptically.

"How do I know?" said the bachelor. "She wasn't my wife."

"Of course not!" cried the widow. "It is always the other man's wife who
is our ideal----"

"She wasn't my ideal," protested the bachelor. "She was the storm that
shattered my ideal and spoiled me for matrimony. She was a whole garage,
a whole stable, a whole harem in one."

The widow looked distinctly disapproving.

"It's lucky," she said coldly, "that you escaped--a woman like--that!"

"But I haven't," protested the bachelor, laying down his paddle and
leaning forward so that the ends of the widow's chiffon veil blew in his
face. "She was the spice in life's pudding, the flavor, the sauce, the
stimulant, the----"

"This canoe is tipping dreadfully," remarked the widow, but the
disapproval had disappeared from her eyes.

"She was----"

"Why, I do believe it's growing dark, Mr. Travers."

"It is," agreed the bachelor. "Nobody can see----"

"See--what?" asked the widow, suddenly sitting up straight and fixing
the bachelor with her eyes.

"How perfectly adorable and unfathomable and tumultuous----"

"Are you feeding me sugar, Mr. Travers?"

"Perhaps," acknowledged the bachelor, leaning back and picking up the
paddle again, "but some day, when I'm ready, I'm going to stop feeding
you sugar. I'm going to put on the curb bit."

"Why don't you do it now--Billy?