"Next month," said I.

"Well, I'm damned," said Jaffery. I asked him why. He did not enlighten
me. "Isn't he a lucky devil?" he asked, instead. "The most
pestilentially lucky devil under the sun. But why the deuce didn't you
tell me before?"

"You expressed such a distaste for female women that we thought we would
give you as long a respite as possible."

"That's all very well," he grumbled. "But if I had known that Adrian's
fiancee was knocking around I'd have lumped her in my heart with Barbara
and Susie."

"You're not prevented from doing that now," said I.

His brow cleared. "True, sonny." He broke into a guffaw. "Fancy old
Adrian getting married!"

"I see nothing funny in it," said I. "Lots of people get married. I'm
married."

"Oh, you--you were born to be married," he said crushingly.

"And so are you," I retorted.

"I? I tie myself to the stay-strings of a flip of a thing in petticoats,
whom I should have to swear to love, honour and obey--?"

"My good fellow," I interrupted, "it is the woman who swears obedience."

"And the man practises it. Ho! Ho! Ho!"

His laughter (at this very poor repartee) so resounded that the
adventitious cow, in the field some hundred yards away, lifted her tail
in the air and scampered away, in terror.

"And as to the stay-strings, to continue your delicate metaphor, you can
always cut them when you like."

"Yes. And then there's the devil to pay. She shows you the ends and
makes you believe they're dripping blood and tears. Don't I know 'em?
They're the same from Cape Horn to Alaska, from Dublin to Rio."

He bellowed forth his invective. He had no quarrel with marriage as an
institution. It was most useful and salutary--apparently because it
provided him, Jaffery, with comfortable conditions wherein to exist. The
multitude of harmless, necessary males (like myself) were doomed to it.
But there was a race of Chosen Ones, to which he belonged, whose
untamable and omni-concupiscent essence kept them outside the dull
conjugal pale. For such as him, nineteen hundred women at once,
scattered within the regions of the seven circumferential seas. He loved
them all. Woman as woman was the joy of the earth. It was only the silly
spectrum of civilisation that broke Woman up into primary
colours--black, yellow, brunette, blonde--he damned civilisation.

"To listen to you," said I, when he paused for breath, "one would think
you were a devil of a fellow."

"I am," he declar