"Please, Letitia," I interrupted with dignity, "please don't call it rubbish. Uncle Ben was not the man to give his favorite nephew rubbish."
"Oh, how we argue! How we argue!" she exclaimed desperately. "I am astonished at this acidulation of character. No more of Merely Mary Arm. You ask me what I want to see, and then decline to see it. It doesn't matter. I'll select something else. Suppose you get tickets for the Barrie play, The Admirable Crichton."
"That's more like it, old girl," I responded exultantly. "Barrie is delightful. He wrote The Little Minister and Quality Street, didn't he? He is reliable; always good—like tea. I admire his originality."
"In The Admirable Crichton," said Letitia, rather demurely, I thought, "there is an old nobleman, who believes in equality. His mania takes the form of treating his servants as his equals. He invites them to parties in his own drawing-room, and makes his own daughters, ladies of title, wait upon them, and ply them with cake and lemonade."
"Bosh!" I ejaculated furiously. "It must be in the air—this vile theme. It is a germ. It is a microbe. I won't pay to see such depravity on the stage. I simply refuse. I—"
"And then," Letitia went on sedately—I couldn't help fancying that she was enjoying herself, and that galled me—"they are all wrecked on a desert island, and the servant becomes the master of the situation, while the old nobleman fetches and carries, and proves that outside of civilization there is no such thing as social superiority."
"Ha! ha!" I laughed sarcastically. "Imagine going to a desert island to prove it. He could find proof of that right here in New York—right here in this very apartment."
"Archie!"
"Certainly he could. Moreover, it is an idea that needs no illumination, to my mind. If that is The Admirable Crichton I don't want to see it. I wouldn't sit it out. Possibly it might be amusing in England. Here, I should consider it insulting. The idea of letting a foreigner treat the servant question for New York. Where is the American playwright? Why don't we foster him? Why are we obliged to swallow the dramatic food made for European stomachs? The only 'servant' play I want to see, is one that places her in her true light—as the bar to marriage, the bar to family life, the bar to domesticity, the bar to digestion, to mental serenity, to—"