“They say that if you’re good here they give you things to read after a month or two, and then I can read up all those instructive books that a fellow never does read until he’s laid up in bed.

“But that’s crowding ahead a bit; I must keep to what happened to-day.  We struck York Road at the back of the Great Western Terminus, and I half hoped we might see some chap we knew coming or going away:  I would like to have waved my hand to him.  It would have been fun to have seen his surprise the next morning when he read in the paper that he had been bowing to jail-birds, and then I would like to have cheated the tipstaves out of just one more friendly good-by.  I wanted to say good-by to somebody, but I really couldn’t feel sorry to see the last of any one of those we passed in the streets—­they were such a dirty, unhappy-looking lot, and the railroad wall ran on forever apparently, and we might have been in a foreign country for all we knew of it.  There were just sooty gray brick tenements and gas-works on one side, and the railroad cutting on the other, and semaphores and telegraph wires overhead, and smoke and grime everywhere, it looked exactly like the sort of street that should lead to a prison, and it seemed a pity to take a smart hansom and a good cob into it.

“It was just a bit different from our last ride together—­when we rode through the night from Krugers-Dorp with hundreds of horses’ hoofs pounding on the soft veldt behind us, and the carbines clanking against the stirrups as they swung on the sling belts.  We were being hunted then, harassed on either side, scurrying for our lives like the Derby Dog in a race-track when every one hoots him and no man steps out to help—­we were sick for sleep, sick for food, lashed by the rain, and we knew that we were beaten; but we were free still, and under open skies with the derricks of the Rand rising like gallows on our left, and Johannesburg only fifteen miles away.”

MISS DELAMAR’S UNDERSTUDY

A young man runs two chances of marrying the wrong woman.  He marries her because she is beautiful, and because he persuades himself that every other lovable attribute must be associated with such beauty, or because she is in love with him.  If this latter is the case, she gives certain values to what he thinks and to what he says which no other woman gives, and so he observes to himself, “This is the woman who best understands me.”

You can reverse this and say that young women run the same risks, but as men are seldom beautiful, the first danger is eliminated.  Women still marry men, however, because they are loved by them, and in time the woman grows to depend upon this love and to need it, and is not content without it, and so she consents to marry the man for no other reason than because he cares for her.  For if a dog, even, runs up to you wagging his tail and acting as though he were glad to see you, you pat him on the head and say, “What a nice dog.”  You like him because he likes you, and not because he belongs to a fine breed of animal and could take blue ribbons at bench shows.