"Ah! dear lady, but 'belles-lettres,' like other feminine things, are so apt to distract our minds from the only serious object of life—which, of course, is money-getting!"
This elicited hisses and laughter, in which the speaker himself joined. Il n'y a que la verité qui blesse. Boston could never take such an accusation to itself.
"One would fancy you were from Chicago!" said Mrs. Courtly.
Now Chicago is to the Bostonians as the full moon is to a dog—they are never tired of baying at it.
"Well, then, I am from Chicago. I was there two weeks ago on business. And what do you suppose I saw in a shop-window? I can tell you it was something worth going to Chicago to see. Why, a statue of the Venus de Medici in a Jaeger's combination suit!"
"Great Scot!" cried a man from the farther end of the table, "Jaeger must be like the poet, nascitur but non fit. Poor goddess! 'To what base uses we may return, Horatio!' But we are a practical people. Beauty and utility with us go hand in hand. Indeed, you see that in this case they don't stop there."
"No," said one of the ladies, gravely. "Life has never been the same to me since I saw Lord Byron's head, with a chestnut wig upon it, in a 'tonsorial saloon,' and a bust of the young Augustus at an optician's, with a pair of blue spectacles on his nose!"
Mrs. Frampton, meantime, was being questioned by her neighbor as to the route the travellers meant to take in going westward.
"I suppose you go through Chicago?" he said.
"Ask my nephew. I am as dough in his hands, and the dough is unleavened. It doesn't rise in the oven of your railway carriages. I dread the journey. By the bye, why will you call them 'cars'? My idea of a 'car' is the thing I remember as a child in my Roman history—Tullia trampling her father to death, you know—and so on."