“But, my good Shearwater, how can you know all about love before you’ve made it with all women?”
“Off we goes, me and the cop and the ’orse, up in front of the police court magistrate....”
“Or are you one of those imbeciles,” Mrs. Viveash went on, “who speak of women with a large W and pretend we’re all the same? Poor Theodore here might possibly think so in his feebler moments.” Gumbril smiled vaguely from a distance. He was following the man with the teacup into the magistrate’s stuffy court. “And Mercaptan certainly does, because all the women who ever sat on his dix-huitième sofa certainly were exactly like one another. And perhaps Casimir does too; all women look like his absurd ideal. But you, Shearwater, you’re intelligent. Surely you don’t believe anything so stupid?”
Shearwater shook his head.
“The cop, ’e gave evidence against me. ‘Limping in all four feet,’ ’e says. ‘It wasn’t,’ I says, and the police court vet, ’e bore me out. ‘The ’orse ’as been very well treated,’ ’e says. ‘But ’e’s old, ’e’s very old.’ ‘I know ’e’s old,’ I says. ‘But where am I goin’ to find the price for a young one?’”
“x2 – y2,” Shearwater was saying, “= (x + y)(x – y). And the equation holds good whatever the values of x and y.... It’s the same with your love business, Mrs. Viveash. The relation is still fundamentally the same, whatever the value of the unknown personal quantities concerned. Little individual tics and peculiarities—after all, what do they matter?”
“What indeed!” said Coleman. “Tics, mere tics. Sheep ticks, horse ticks, bed bugs, tape worms, taint worms, guinea worms, liver flukes....”
“‘The ’orse must be destroyed,” says the beak. “’E’s too old for work.’ ‘But I’m not,’ I says. ‘I can’t get a old age pension at thirty-two, can I? ’Ow am I to earn my living if you take away what I earns my living by?’”
Mrs. Viveash smiled agonizingly. “Here’s a man who thinks personal peculiarities are trivial and unimportant,” she said. “You’re not even interested in people, then?”
“‘I don’t know what you can do,’ ’e says. ‘I’m only ’ere to administer the law.’ ‘Seems a queer sort of law,’ I says. ‘What law is it?’”