"Pleasure ought to be spread."
"Take bananas, for instance," said the Unwiseman, not deigning to notice Whistlebinkie's apology. "I dare say if your mother gives you a banana, you go off into a corner and gobble it right up. Now I find that a nibble tastes just as good as a bite, and by nibbling you can get so many more tastes out of that banana, as nibbles are smaller than bites, and instead of a banana lasting a week, or two weeks or eight weeks, it's all gone in ten seconds. You might do the same thing at the circus and be as sensible as you are when you gobble your banana. If the clown cracked his jokes and the trapezuarius trapozed, and the elephants danced, and the bare-back riders rode their horses all at once, you'd have just as much circus as you get the way you do it now, only it wouldn't be so pleasant. Pleasure, after all, is like butter, and it ought to be spread. You wouldn't think of eating a whole pat of butter at one gulp, so why should you be greedy about your pleasure?"
"Thassounds very sensible," put in Whistlebinkie.
"It is sensible," said the Unwiseman, with a kindly smile; "and that is why, having but one eclaire, I make it last me eight weeks. There isn't any use of living like a prince for five minutes and then starving to death for seven weeks, six days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-five minutes."
Here the Unwiseman opened the drawer of his table and took out the eclaire to show it to Mollie.
"It doesn't look very good," said Mollie.
"That's true," said the Unwiseman; "but that helps. It's awfully hard work the first day to keep from nibbling it up too fast, but the second day it's easier, and so it goes all along until you get to the fourth week, and then you don't mind only taking a nibble. If it stayed good all the while, I don't believe I could make it last as long as I want to. So you see everything works for good under my system of luncheoning. In the first place the pleasure of a thing lasts a long time; in the second, you learn to resist temptation; in the third place, you avoid greediness; and last of all, after a while you don't mind not being greedy."
"The old gentleman put the eclaire away."