Riley Marshall at home, she no doubt makes him ecstatically happy in those solemn moments when his mind wishes to grapple understandingly with the infinite. But suppose that poor chap comes home some[Pg 30] night worn to a frazzle with the worries and complications of his business affairs, his spirit fairly yearning for something fluffy and intellectually completely restful, do you suppose for a moment that he is going to be lifted out of the morass of his woe by a conversation with that lady of his on the subject of the Inestimable Infinitude of the Protoplasmic Suffragette as outlined by Professor Sophocles J. Plato in the latest issue of the South American Review? Not he, my dear Mrs. Pedagog. What he wants on that occasion is somebody to sit alongside of him while he pulls away on his old briarwood pipe, holding his tired little paddy in her soft right hand, while she twitters forth George Ade's latest Fable on 'The Flipper that Flapped', or something else equally diverting. The reverse of the picture is equally true. If there is anything in the world that drives a man to despair it[Pg 31] is to have to listen to five o'clock tea gabble when he happens to be in a mood for the Alexander Hamilton, or Vice-President Marshall style of discourse. The facts are the same in both cases. The Bernard Shaw lady is a delight to the heart and soul in his Bernard Shaw moods. The George Ade lady is a source of unalloyed bliss in a George Ade mood, but they don't reverse readily, and in most cases they can't reverse at all. Then there are other equally baffling complications along other lines. A man may be crazy about poetry, and he falls in love, as he supposes, with a dainty little creature in gold-rimmed eyeglasses, who writes the most exquisite lyrics, simply because he thinks at the moment that those lyrics are going to make his life just one sweet song after another. He marries the little songbird, and then what happens?"

[Pg 29]

[Pg 30]

[Pg 31]

"Never having married a canary, I[Pg 32] don't know," said the Landlady, with a glance at her husband.

[Pg 32]

"Well, I'll tell you," said the Idiot. "He has a honeymoon of lovely images. He feels like a colt put out to pasture on the slopes of Parnassus. Life runs along with the lilt of a patter song—and then, to indulge in a joke worthy of the palmiest days of London Punch, he comes out of Patter-Song! There dawns a day when he is full chock-a-block up to his neck with poetry, and the inner man craves the re-enforcement of the kind of 

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