Sheba turned a sudden grinning face upon him.
“The little upstarts!
It takes us to tell ’em, ‘Gene,” she said.
He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker chair.
John Dorsey slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward whining inchoately, drooling slightly at the mouth.
“The Lord a’ mercy!” he wheezed, gasping.
“I was talking to a feller the other day,” said Sheba, “a lawyer that you’d think might know a LITTLE something, and I used a quotation out of The Merchant of Venice that every schoolboy knows —
‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’
The man looked at me as if he thought I was crazy!”
“Great heavens!” said Margaret in a still voice.
“I said, ‘Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a smart lawyer, you may have your million dollars that they say you have, but there are a lot of things you don’t know yet.
There are a lot of things money can’t buy, my sonny, and one of them is the society of cult-shered men and women.’"
“Why, pshaw!” said Mr. Leonard.
“What do these little whipper-snappers know about the things of the mind?
You might as well expect some ignorant darky out in the fields to construe a passage in Homer.”
He grasped a glass half full of clabber, on the table, and tilting it intently in his chalky fingers, spooned out a lumpy spilth of curds which he slid, quivering, into his mouth.
“No, sir!” he laughed.
“They may be Big Men on the tax collector’s books, but when they try to associate with educated men and women, as the feller says, ‘they — they —’” he began to whine, “‘why, they just ain’t nothin’.’”
“What shall it profit a man,” said Sheba, “if he gain the whole world, and lose —”
“Ah, Lord!” sighed Margaret, shaking her smoke-dark eyes.
“I tell you!”
She told him.
She told him of the Swan’s profound knowledge of the human heart, his universal and well-rounded characterization, his enormous humor.
“Fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock!” She laughed.
“The fat rascal!
Imagine a man keeping the time!”
And, carefully:
“It was the custom of the time, ‘Gene.
As a matter of fact, when you read some of the plays of his contemporaries you see how much purer he is than they are.”
But she avoided a word, a line, here and there.
The slightly spotty Swan — muddied a little by custom.
Then, too, the Bible.
The smoky candle-ends of time.
Parnassus As Seen From Mount Sinai: Lecture with lantern-slides by Professor McTavish (D.D.) of Presbyterian College.
“And observe, Eugene,” she said, “he never made vice attractive.”
“Why didn’t he?” he asked.
“There’s Falstaff.”
“Yes,” she replied, “and you know what happened to him, don’t you?”
“Why,” he considered, “he died!”
“You see, don’t you?” she concluded, with triumphant warning.
I see, don’t I?
The wages of sin.
What, by the way, are the wages of virtue?
The good die young.
Boo-hoo!
Boo-hoo!
Boo-hoo!
I really feel so blue!
I was given to crime,
And cut off in my prime