AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD THE LION-HEARTED
“I don’t like women,” said Richard of Brookline, and to prove it he sucked more violently upon a lavender lollipop.
Richard spoke with all the authority of one who has spent seven years living across the street from five fair ladies. One might mention that these seven years were his first spent anywhere, and that these fair but fearsome feminists ranged from six to sixteen. The locale was Brookline, and the time romantic summer—at this point my story begins.
Not long ago Richard wandered down the broad highway sucking upon his solitary lollipop, and wearing on his eyebrows the air of a world-weary capitalist. He did not offer to share his bounty with the ladies across the way, but did not object to having them watch him from their lollipopless porch. It was this haughty attitude that first made the Sleuth suspect him to be a woman hater.
And so the Sleuth set off upon his trail immediately, but Richard, like many a courtly gentleman, proved to be as diffident as he was bold.
“Why don’t you like women?” he was asked. And he replied:
“Because.”
“Because what?” the Sleuth persisted; whereupon Richard raised his eyebrows with an air of finality.
“Because I don’t,” he said.
“Don’t you like your Mama?” he was asked, and regarded the questioner scornfully.
“She isn’t a girl,” quoth he.
“But she probably was once!” The Sleuth hazarded a guess.
Alas, at this point Richard was called to bed. But the next day the argument was continued. It was after a nerve-racking game of puss-in-the-corner, when the assembled court had been astonished at the lion-hearted Richard’s chivalry. Twice had he surrendered his hard-earned corner to a fluffy little four-year-old blond. The Sleuth joshed him as man to man. But Richard smiled about it, and man-like waived present contingencies to speak glittering generalities.
“Girls,” he said, “are like fish.” But he omitted further details; and as he mused on the matter, his thoughts fell into metaphors. “Like fish,” he repeated solemnly. And then he spied a crop of bobbed and almost masculine hair that was bouncing outside the hedge fence. “Or like hares. Some say that they are chickens, but I think that they are more like trees.”
“Because they wear fine feathers,” someone contributed.
“Certainly,” he agreed.
“But you don’t think they’re all shady, do you?” the Sleuth hastened to interpose.
“Most are,” he sighed.
And at this point he rose, to show that the interview was at an end, and, swinging his tin drum about his neck, he solemnly paraded down the block to that very masculine tune “Johnny get your Gun.”