“It would be a wise Polydore that knows its own parents,” I observed.
The slight illness of Diogenes lasted three or four days. I still shudder to recall the memory of that hideous period. Silvia’s time and attention were devoted to the 58 sick child. Huldah was putting in all her leisure moments at the dentist’s, where she was acquiring her third set of teeth, and joy rode unconfined and unrestrained with our “boarders.”
Polydore proclivities made the Reign of Terror formerly known as the French Revolution seem like an ice cream festival. I don’t regard myself as a particularly nervous man, but there’s a limit! Their war whoops and screeches got on my nerves and temper to the extent of sending me into their midst one evening brandishing a whip and commanding immediate silence. I got it. Not through fear of chastisement, for fear was an emotion unknown to a Polydore, but from astonishment at so unexpected a procedure from so unexpected a source. Heretofore I had either ignored them or frolicked with them. Before they had recovered 59 from their shock, Silvia appeared on the scene.
“Diogenes,” she informed them, “was not used to such unwonted quiet, and was fretting at the unaccustomed stillness. Would the boys please play Indian or some of their games again?”
The boys would. I backed from the room, the whip behind me, carefully kept without Silvia’s angle of vision. Before Ptolemy resumed his rôle of chief, he bestowed a knowing and maddening wink upon me.
I wished that we had remained neighbor-less. I wished that the aborigines would scalp Felix Polydore and the writer of Modern Antiquities. Then we could land their brats on the Probate Court. I wished that this were the reign of Herod. I vowed I would backslide from the Presbyterian faith since it no longer included in its 60 articles of belief the eternal damnation of infants. How long, O Catiline, would––
A paralyzing suspicion flashed into the maelstrom of my vituperative maledictions. I rushed wildly upstairs to our combination bedroom, sickroom, and nursery, where Silvia sat like a guardian angel beside the Polydore patient.
“Silvia,” I shouted excitedly, “do you suppose those diabolical Polydore parents purposely played this trick on us? Was it a premeditated Polydore plan to abandon their young? And can you blame them for playing us for easy marks? Could any parents, Polydore, or otherwise, ever come back to such fiends as these?”
“Hush!” she cautioned, without so much as a glance in my direction. “You’ll wake Diogenes!”
Wake Diogenes! Ye Gods! And she had also implored the brothers of Diogenes 61 to continue their anvil chorus! This took the last stitch of starch from my manly bosom. Spiritless and spineless I bore all things, believed all things––but hoped for nothing.