Part 23

“Neither is the United States.”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s too easy for sick or worthless people to survive nowadays. They are clotting up our square miles very fast. Philanthropists don’t seem to remember that you can beget children a great deal faster than you can educate them; and at this rate I believe universal suffrage will kill us off before our time.”

“Do not believe it! We are going to find out that universal suffrage is like the appendix--useful at an early stage of the race’s evolution but to-day merely a threat to life.”

He thought this over. “But a surgical operation is pretty serious, you know.”

“It’ll be done by absorption. Why, you’ve begun it yourselves, and so has Massachusetts. The appendix will be removed, black and white--and I shouldn’t much fear surgery. We’re not nearly civilized enough yet to have lost the power Of recuperation, and in spite of our express-train speed, I doubt if we shall travel from crudity to rottenness without a pause at maturity.”

“That is the old, old story,” he said.

“Yes; is there anything new under the sun?”

He was gloomy. “Nothing, I suppose.” Then the gloom lightened. “Nothing new under the sun--except the fashionable families of Newport!”

This again brought us from the clouds of speculation down to Worship Street, where we were walking toward South Place. It also unexpectedly furnished me with the means to lead back our talk so gently, without a jolt or a jerk, to my moral and the delicate topic of matrimony from which he had dodged away, that he never awoke to what was coming until it had come. He began pointing out, as we passed them, certain houses which were now, or had at some period been, the dwellings of his many relatives: “My cousin Julia So-and-so lives there,” he would say; or, “My great-uncle, known as Regent Tom, owned that before the War”; and once, “The Rev. Joseph Priedieu, my great-grandfather, built that house to marry his fifth wife in, but the grave claimed him first.”

So I asked him a riddle. “What is the difference between Kings Port and Newport?”

This he, of course, gave up.

“Here you are all connected by marriage, and there they are all connected by divorce.”

“That’s true!” he cried, “that’s very true. I met the most embarrassingly cater-cornered families.”

“Oh, they weren’t embarrassed!” I interjected.

“No, but I was,” said John.

“And you told me you weren’t innocent!” I exclaimed. “They are going to institute a divorce march,” I continued. “‘Lohengrin’ or ‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ played backward. They have not settled which it is to be taught in the nursery with the other kindergarten melodies.”

He was still unsuspectingly diverted; and we walked along until we turned in the direction of my boarding-house.

“Did you ever notice,” I now said, “what a perpetual allegory ‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ contains?”

“I thought it was just a fairy sort of thing.”

“Yes, but when a great poet sets his hand to a fairy sort of thing, you get--well, you get poor Titania.”

“She fell in love with a jackass,” he remarked. “Puck bewitched her.”

“Precisely. A lovely woman with her arms around a jackass. Does that never happen in Kings Port?”

He began smiling to himself. “I’m afraid Puck isn’t all dead yet.”

I was now in a position to begin dropping my bitters. “Shakespeare was probably too gallant to put it the other way, and make Oberon fall in love with a female jackass. But what an allegory!”

“Yes,” he muttered. “Yes.”

I followed with another drop. “Titania got out of it. It is not always solved so easily.”

“No,” he muttered. “No.” It was quite evident that the flavor of my bitters reached him.

He was walking slowly, with his head down, and frowning hard. We had now come to the steps of my boarding-house, and I dropped my last drop. “But a disenchanted woman has the best of it--before marriage, at least.”