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One morning when they walked in St. James’s Park to feed the ducks she said to him:

“Sam, when are we to be married?”

When for three years a man has been begging a girl to marry him, and she consents at the exact moment when, without capitulation to all that he holds honorable, he cannot marry anybody, his position deserves sympathy.

“My dear one,” exclaimed the unhappy youth, “you make me the most miserable of men! I can’t marry! I’m in an awful place! If I married you now I’d be a crook! It isn’t a question of love in a cottage, with bread and cheese. If cottages were renting for a dollar a year I couldn’t rent one for ten minutes. I haven’t cheese enough to bait a mouse-trap. It’s terrible! But we have got to wait.”

“Wait!” cried Polly. “I thought you had been waiting! Have I been away too long? Do you love some one else?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” said Sam crossly. “Look at me,” he commanded, “and tell me whom I love!”

Polly did not take time to look.

“But I,” she protested, “have so much money!”

“It’s not your money,” explained Sam. “It’s your mother’s money or your father’s, and both of them dislike me. They even have told me so. Your mother wants you to marry that Italian; and your father, having half the money in America, naturally wants to marry you to the other half. If I were selfish and married you I’d be all the things they think I am.”

“You are selfish!” cried Polly. “You’re thinking of yourself and of what people will say, instead of how to make me happy. What’s the use of money if you can’t buy what you want?”

“Are you suggesting you can buy me?” demanded Sam.

“Surely,” said Polly–“if I can’t get you any other way. And you may name your own price, too.”

“When I am making enough to support myself without sponging on you,” explained Sam, “you can have as many millions as you like; but I must first make enough to keep me alive. A man who can’t do that isn’t fit to marry.”

“How much,” demanded Polly, “do you need to keep you alive? Maybe I could lend it to you.”

Sam was entirely serious.

“Three thousand a year,” he said.

Polly exclaimed indignantly.

“I call that extremely extravagant!” she cried. “If we wait until you earn three thousand a year we may be dead. Do you expect to earn that writing stories?”

“I can try,” said Sam–“or I will rob a bank.”

Polly smiled upon him appealingly.

“You know how I love your stories,” she said, “and I wouldn’t hurt your feelings for the world; but, Sam dear, I think you had better rob a bank!”

Addressing an imaginary audience, supposedly of men, Sam exclaimed:

“Isn’t that just like a woman? She wouldn’t care,” he protested, “how I got the money!”

Polly smiled cheerfully.

“Not if I got you!” she said. In extenuation, also, she addressed an imaginary audience, presumably of women. “That’s how I love him!” she exclaimed. “And he asks me to wait! Isn’t that just like a man? Seriously,” she went on, “if we just go ahead and get married father would have to help us. He’d make you a vice-president or something.”

At this suggestion Sam expressed his extreme displeasure.

“The last time I talked to your father,” he said, “I was in a position to marry, and I told him I wanted to marry you. What he said to that was: ‘Don’t be an ass!’ Then I told him he was unintelligent– and I told him why. First, because he could not see that a man might want to marry his daughter in spite of her money; and second, because he couldn’t see that her money wouldn’t make up to a man for having him for a father-in-law.”

“Did you have to tell him that?” asked Polly.