olely in a
change of locality, which was why she went to Newport every summer,
there to indulge in further routs and dances when she wearied of the
routs and dances of New York.

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