“It has been rather unseasonable,” assented the financier; “but then you always feel the heat so much more during the first few hot days.”
“Besides,” came the judicious comment, “it has not been the heat which was so oppressive this morning, I think, as the great amount of humidity in the air.”
“Yes, it is most unpleasant—makes your clothes stick to you so.”
“Ah, but don’t you find, now,” asked the premier gaily, “that looking at the thermometer tends to make you feel, really, much more uncomfortable than if you stayed uninformed as to precisely how hot it was?”
“Well! where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise, as I remember to have seen stated somewhere.”
“By George, though, it is wonderful how true are many of those old sayings!” observed the personage. “We assume we are much wiser than our fathers: but I doubt if we really are, in the big things that count.”
“In fact, I have often wondered what George Washington, for example, would think of the republic he helped to found, if he could see it nowadays.”
“He would probably find it very different from what he imagined it would be.”
“Why, he would probably turn in his grave, at some of our newfangled notions—such as prohibition and equal suffrage.”
“Oh, well, all sensible people know, of course, that the trouble with prohibition is that it does not prohibit, and that woman’s place is the home, not in the mire of politics.”