“But why isn’t my conscience as practical as my clothes?” persisted Madeline. “And why is the fortune made to-day in Montana mines and lost to-morrow in Wall Street any more practical than this same majestic march of the centuries and the great thoughts that circle about it? ‘Practical’ is such a foolish word, Dick.”
“Undoubtedly, to you,” said Dick with a little sneer. “But to most of the race to which we have the honor to belong it is the word that makes the dictionary heavy. It is because you do not know its meaning that you women, or perhaps I ought to use the despised term, ‘ladies,’ become the very beautiful and useless articles that you are—works of art, which may thrill and charm a man for a moment, when he has time to look at them, but which bear little relation to the stress of life which you can not comprehend.”
“Dick!” Madeline spoke almost with tears in her eyes. “It is not like you to have a fling at women.”
“You see I’m gathering wisdom as I go along.”
“Gathering idiocy, you mean,” interposed Mr. Lenox. “Dick, you young fool, the ideal woman is the goal toward which the rest of humanity must run; and the sooner you bend all your practical faculties in that direction, and there abase the knee, the better for you.”
He nodded down the table toward his wife, and she pursed up her lips and said, “You nice goose! That’s the way to keep us sweet-tempered.”
“I hope you’re not going to turn cynic, Dick,” said Ellery. “The rôle does not fit you.”
“A cynic,” interposed Mrs. Lenox, “always thinks that he has discovered the sourness of the world. In reality all he has found is his own bad digestion. I should hate to think there was anything on my table to cause acute indigestion, Dick.”
“Perhaps there is a cog loose in his brain so that his wheels do not work together,” added Ellery.
“At any rate, cynicism is self-confessed failure; so don’t give way to it,” Mr. Lenox concluded.