"Now see here, Mr. Idiot," said the Bibliomaniac, firmly and impressively, "I want you to distinctly understand that I am not going to have you put words into my mouth that I never uttered. I—"
"Pray, don't attack me," said the Idiot. "I haven't made any charge against you. I only asked who could have said that the Doctor looked like a creation of Cruikshank. I couldn't have said it, because I don't think it. Mr. Pedagog denies it. In fact, every one here has a clear case of innocence excepting yourself, and I don't believe you said it, only the chain of circumstance—"
"Oh, hang your chain of circumstance!" interrupted the Bibliomaniac.
"It is hung," said the Idiot, "and it appears to make you very uncomfortable. However, as I was saying, I think I have got hold of an idea involving a truly philanthropic and by no means selfish scheme of Social Expansion."
"Heigho!" sighed Mr. Pedagog. "I sometimes think that if I had not the honor to be the husband of our landlady I'd move away from here. Your views, sir, are undermining my constitution."
"You only think so, Mr. Pedagog," replied the Idiot. "You are simply going through a process of intellectual reconstruction at my hands. You feel exactly as a man feels who has been shut up in the dark for years and suddenly finds himself in a flood of sunlight. I am doing with you as an individual what I would have society do for mankind at large—in other words, while I am working for individual expansion upon the raw material I find here, I would have society buckle down to the enlargement of itself by the improvement of those outside of itself."
"If you swim in water as well as you do in verbiage," said the Bibliomaniac, "you must be able to go three or four strokes without sinking."
"Oh, as for that, I can swim like a duck," said the Idiot. "You can't sink me."
"I fancied not," observed Mr. Pedagog, with a smile at his own joke. "You are so light I wonder, indeed, that you don't rise up into space, anyhow."
"What a delightful condition of affairs that suggestion opens up!" said the Idiot, turning to the Poet. "If I were you I'd make a poem on that. Something like this, for instance: