“He is sleeping?”
“We used to give him powders to make him sleep and forget. Isn’t this a better way?”
“Sleeping powders, my dear, do not operate upon the whole family!”
Barnes smiled.
“Am I so dull?” he asked.
“I was referring to their dream properties rather than their soporific,” Aunt Philomela answered with some magnanimity and yet with suspicious point, too.
“There is a distinction between dreaming and sleeping,” he admitted.
“A clear distinction.”
“It might mark all the difference between a poet and a bore.”
“There is little harm in bores,” declared Aunt Philomela.