“Truly. And flop from one to the other with lightning rapidity. We are too completely superior to reason to have any respect for or reliance on it. Do you think I try reason on my husband when he is in the wrong in his arguments with me! Not at all. I just say, ‘I’m afraid you are not feeling well, dear.’ And I put a mustard plaster on him. It’s extraordinary how seldom he disagrees nowadays. Or when he’s very obstinately set on an objectionable course, it’s a good plan to say sweetly, ‘I’ll do just as you like, dear.’ He invariably comes back with an emphatic, ‘No—we’ll do as you like.’”
“I relinquish all claims to be called a reasonable being,” said Mr. Lenox with a wry face.
“When we, the unmarried, hear confessions of this kind,” said Madeline, “it gives us an incongruous feeling to remember how happy you, the married, seem, after all.”
“Getting along becomes a habit,” retorted Dick. “Matrimony is like taking opium. It fixes itself on you. I suppose when the hero of Kipling’s poem found out that she was only ‘a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,’ he kept on loving the rag, even while he felt like gnawing the bone and pulling the hair.”
He knew he had said an ugly thing. It wasn’t like him. He flushed as he saw Mrs. Lenox glance sharply at him.
“Dick, Dick, that is heresy,” she exclaimed gaily. “We must pretend there aren’t any vampires, and that we do not know what they are made of. If we tell the naked truth, how can we cry out with conviction that the old world is an harmonious and beautiful place?”
“That isn’t your real philosophy,” he said.
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “I sometimes wish it were. If one could have the temperament to shut one’s eyes and say, ‘I don’t see it; therefore it isn’t true,’ what a very easy thing life would be.”
“I don’t know,” answered Dick. “Going it blind with a dog and a string doesn’t generally make it easier to walk.”
“That’s true,” Madeline put in. “A little dog isn’t a very good guide up the hilly road of righteousness. As for me, I prefer open-eyed obedience to blind obedience.”