LILLIAN GISH AS ELSIE, AND THE SENTINEL.

“You don’t say so!” cried Ben, bursting into a hearty laugh. “Isn’t your aunt, Mrs. Farnham, the president of a club?”

“Yes, and she is a very brilliant woman.”

“Enlighten me further.”

“I deny your heaven-born male kingship. The lord of creation is after all a very inferior animal—nearer the brute creation, weaker in infancy, shorter lived, more imperfectly developed, given to fighting, and addicted to idiocy. I never saw a female idiot in my life—did you?”

“Come to think of it, I never did,” acknowledged Ben with comic gravity. “What else?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“It’s nothing. I agree with everything you say, but it is irrelevant. I’m studying law, you know.”