“She must be an extraordinary woman,” commented the Old Maid.
“The trouble I have put myself to in order to keep that woman, just because George likes her savouries, no one would believe,” continued indignantly the Woman of the World. “We have had a dinner party regularly once a week for the last six months, entirely for her benefit. Now she wants me to give two. I won’t do it!”
“If I could be of any service?” offered the Minor Poet. “My digestion is not what it once was, but I could make up in quality—a recherché little banquet twice a week, say on Wednesdays and Saturdays, I would make a point of eating with you. If you think that would content her!”
“It is really thoughtful of you,” replied the Woman of the World, “but I cannot permit it. Why should you be dragged from the simple repast suitable to a poet merely to oblige my cook? It is not reason.”
“I was thinking rather of you,” continued the Minor Poet.
“I’ve half a mind,” said the Woman of the World, “to give up housekeeping altogether and go into an hotel. I don’t like the idea, but really servants are becoming impossible.”
“It is very interesting,” said the Minor Poet.
“I am glad you find it so!” snapped the Woman of the World.
“What is interesting?” I asked the Minor Poet.
“That the tendency of the age,” he replied, “should be slowly but surely driving us into the practical adoption of a social state that for years we have been denouncing the Socialists for merely suggesting. Everywhere the public-houses are multiplying, the private dwellings diminishing.”