"Easily," said she, with a nod. "It's the way they
look at a woman. A married man looks at you quietly
as if he knew all about you. There isn't any strangeness
about him with a woman at all; but a bachelor man looks
at you very sharp and looks away and then looks back
again, the way you'd know he was thinking about you and
didn't know what you were thinking about him; and so
they are always strange, and that's why women like
them."

"Why!" said the Philosopher, astonished, "do women
like bachelors better than married men?"

"Of course they do," she replied heartily. "They
wouldn't look at the side of the road a married man was
on if there was a bachelor man on the other side."

"This," said the Philosopher earnestly, "is very inter-
esting."

"And the queer thing is," she continued, "that when I
came up the road and saw you I said to myself 'it's a
bachelor man.' How long have you been married,
now?"

"I don't know," said the Philosopher. "Maybe it's
ten years."

"And how many children would you have, mister?"