"Cato, you ought to be writing tracts for the Ethical Culture Society instead of newspaper articles for Hutchins' wicked Evening Chronicle. What are you doing among the Outlaws instead of in a goody-goody Sunday School?"
He took her raillery in good part.
"Every journalist is a patcher-up of unconsidered trifles," he said. "He makes a crazy quilt of them as orderly and coherent as he can. Well, where can I get the raw material I need in greater supply than in this little community of criminality and sentimentality, of Radicalism and bad debts? Kips Bay is an inexhaustible mine of police news and town talk."
"Well, I can't say that your kind stay among us has broadened you out much, Rob!"
"No?" he replied, amused at the shot. "I suppose I do grow more squeamish every day. Nothing like a steady diet of police episodes for purifying purposes. It acts the way some nauseous drugs do."
"You're perfectly detestable," she cried. She didn't like anybody but herself to disparage Kips Bay. "You've put your mind in a prison, Rob. Your symptoms require a drastic remedy. If I were a physician of the soul, I should prescribe marriage."
"Don't be a Job's comforter, Cornelia. I said I wanted female society, not female satiety. And, by the way, since when did you begin to advocate marriage as the door to freedom? You have always denounced it as the trapdoor to slavery."
"I don't advocate it for women, and even for men I recommend it only in the most desperate cases."
"Well, mine isn't desperate. But Hutchins Burley's is, judging from his conduct at the ball tonight. You might prescribe for him."
"Oh, he's past all treatment. What do you think he told me in strict confidence yesterday? That he's weighed down by a great sorrow; too many women find him irresistible, and persecute him to death with their lovesick attentions."