"You know how I have always loved her," I went on. Aunt Lucretia glanced sharply at me. "I mean how I've cared for her," I amended. "But do you—do you honestly believe, Aunt Lucretia, that she loves me—cares for me that way?"
"Tut—tut," she said sharply, "what nonsense you talk! What does it matter? This silly love business has spoiled more good pedigrees and brought more fools into the world, I tell you, than anything else under the sun. What a fine breed of folks we'd have had in the world by now if so many idiots had not fallen in love and married without a moment's thought of results. You ought to be grateful to me, Jack," she continued after a while; "you will be grateful, I am sure, some day, that you had me to select a wife for you and didn't just happen to fall in love. That's an accident often as fatal as happening to fall down the steps.
"It is awful, Jack, this haphazard of humanity!" she went on in a moment. "No wonder only one in a hundred is born who has got any brains in his head. Think of it, Jack, our race is so pig-headed from thoughtless marryings that it took them three hundred years after they invented a saddle before it dawned upon them that they needed stirrups to complete it. Rode three centuries on bare saddles for lack of sense enough to invent stirrups! Some day for the benefit of humanity I am going to open a human Registry. I want to do this because I think it is our duty to try to teach people to take as much interest in their own children's pedigree as they do in their horses' or dogs'. Many a man falls in love with and marries a woman whose qualities and character, and pedigree, if she were a horse, he wouldn't be caught trading a blind mule for! And many a woman, under the same divine influence, marries some vicious brute of a man for no other reason than because she has just fallen in love with him, or maybe wants to reform him, who, if he were turned into a buggy horse she wouldn't be caught risking her neck behind.
"And this is the way I'd go to registering my people," she continued. "In all registration there must be a foundation stock. For man, I'd let Truthfulness, Bravery, Honesty, Manliness, and Ability to Do Things, count as Foundations. This would change the present social system radically and let into good society and life a flood of good blood that is at present badly needed but is shut out, unless it suddenly happens to get rich and comes in under a dress suit. I would make accomplishments, the Ability to Do Things, from the Ability to do Poetry, Art, Drama, Music—everything that is worth while—to the ability to make two blades of grass grow, the greatest of them all, count as my classes, and it wouldn't take me long to straighten out Old Humanity and breed a race of people, who, in a few generations, as old Horace says, would strike the stars with their uplifted heads!"
She laughed. "Look, Jack, here it is. I have worked it all out, just for fun." She unrolled a parchment, as immaculately executed in decorated letters as Eloise's pedigree had been. Then she read, glancing over her glasses now and then to emphasize her remarks.
"A STANDARD OF HUMAN REGISTRATION.
When white men and women meet the following requirements and are duly registered, they shall be accepted as standard bred, and shall be permitted to marry:
FIRST: Any white man, who has a home of his own and is honest, industrious, and truthful, and sound in wind, limb and eye.
SECOND: Any white woman, who can cook a good meal, make her own clothes, keep a home clean, lives a pure life, and has some moral standard for herself and children, and will agree to raise them under it.
THIRD: Every man who is the father of a great man or woman.