When first I made up my mind to come out into the golden light of your everyday life, I vow that I positively shivered at all the misery, the sorrow, the drabness of existence, which you yourselves led me to believe made up the sum total of your lives in this twentieth century. Much less did I relish the thought of compiling a whole book on what I feared would be a most depressing task. This work, I said, will fatigue me most atrociously; it will bore me most unhappily; I verily feared that my exuberant romanticism would be shipwrecked under the strain.

And now, here I am at the last chapter of this little book and it seems to me that the time which I have spent in this fascinating, marvellous new world of yours was but the space of a breath. I have only seen a few of its hundreds of astonishing facets, and, believe me, I feel that there are thousands more of which I have not even caught a glimpse. So I'll console myself with the thought of another visit to you all at some future time.

I know you will forgive me if I make use of this final chapter for the benefit of those of you young moderns who will wake one morning soon to the sound of your own wedding-bells.

The latest fashion, it seems, is to treat marriage as nothing more or less than a business contract. Had this been any but my last chapter I would have resisted so monstrous a suggestion and written twenty more to make out a case for love. But things being as they are, let us by all means treat this marriage question as strictly business, and let me begin by asking you how you individually would approach a business proposition? I know little of such things, but I venture to presume that you would expect in a business partner an upright, honourable character, a clean bill of health and a full measure of discretion, ability, of sense, and of honour. Pessimists, when I started this book, might have confounded me with the argument that these things are not to be found in modern business men, but now that I know more about you all, and know that there are just as many sterling qualities to be found in your men of to-day as ever there were in the past, I can, in my turn, confound your pessimists.

You would also doubtless refuse to enter into business partnership with a person who looked upon the contract as a sort of slipknot. Odd's my life! if business was to be run in the slipshod manner in which some of you moderns deal with matrimony, the bankruptcy courts would be kept as busy as are the divorce courts, and the finances of the entire world would soon be engulfed in chaos.

You know as well as I do--better probably--that for a business to be successful it needs to be carried on by men or women who have brains, initiative, training and tact. But so does marriage, m'dears! All the qualities which you expect to find in your successful business men you must look for in the partner who is to be life's companion, to whom you are going to entrust your happiness, your future and, what's more, the future of your children.

What chances, think you, would a business have if its principals knew nothing of its workings? Yet how many of you dear, irresponsible young things trip lightly up to the altar and embark on the serious business of matrimony, blissfully ignorant of how to cook a dinner, engage a maid, furnish a house or earn a regular income? No one would think of designing a public building without becoming first a qualified architect, and the law forbids any man to practise medicine without due qualifications, the result of years of strenuous study; yet one sees numberless men and women entering the serious state of marriage without the slightest idea of the duties and responsibilities it will presently entail. Can you wonder, then, that so many marriages end in recriminations, in heartbreakings and sorrow, and finally in the divorce court?

Is marriage a business? Well, we will not argue over the word. 'Tis you moderns who choose to call it so, and then deride it because, forsooth, in your estimation its profit-and-loss account points to bankruptcy. What you want to do, m'dears, is to look upon marriage as a business if you must, but also as a foundation--the only solid one--on which you can raise the edifice of lifelong happiness. By it alone can you obtain comradeship, sympathy and understanding, and that wonderful feeling that in the world there is one being whose interests are absolutely identical with yours.

All of you young moderns, I know, are fond of saying that by marriage you lose your freedom. So you do. You lose the freedom of wandering uncared for on life's highway, the freedom of weeping alone and uncomforted when sorrow assails you. You lose the freedom of suffering in loneliness, and of being forced to bottle up your joy because there is no one who cares enough to share it with you. Well, m'dears, if that be freedom, give me all the fetters that love can forge: home ties, friendship, not to mention baby fingers that cling so tightly to the heart.

Have I lost something of glamour in your eyes now that I have made you think of me, not as the hero of a hundred adventures in the romantic days of revolutionary France, but as a romanticist who has learned that in all the adventures of life there is none to compare with the one we embark on when we set forth to choose our helpmate?

Once more, I pray you, charge your glasses, you lovely, sleek-headed, slim-legged Amazons, and you ambitious, enterprising Britons all! Drink to the master of you all--Love the King! He is all that matters in life, and in this great business of living he is the profit--worth all the gold of the Indies and all the laurel wreaths ever woven, on which you can count as a set-off against failure or disappointment or sorrow.

On this let me make my bow to you of this still young century, happy in the knowledge that your world of to-day is every whit as romantic as it was in the past. Your men are as gallant, your women as charming as ever they were. There is as much romance in your civilization, your commerce and your marvellous inventions, as there were in medieval jousts, in duelling or poesy. Let me express the earnest hope that I have convinced you of this. Rub your eyes, m'dears, and take another look at your world. Do not allow those demmed cynics and pessimists to be for ever pointing to mud-heaps and gutters, telling you that they are the realities of life; for I vow that real life is full to overflowing of fragrance and of beauty. Look about you, m'dears and see the loyalties, the friendships, the silent endurances and sacrifice that meet you at every turn. And then, I pray you, murmur to yourself: 'Well, I declare that demmed elusive Pimpernel of ours does know a thing or two!'

Gentlemen, your servant!

Ladies, as ever, your most devoted slave!