Knows it at forty and reforms his plan.’”
“Thank you, Young,” said Methuselah, gratefully. “Your ‘Night Thoughts’ have shed light on a dark subject. Young is older in wisdom than his name implies, for a man does not get his mental equilibrium until the pendulum is swinging to the west, and he becomes too old to wallow in champagne or to eat lobster suppers with a peroxide blonde. A man’s legs may be in a forced retreat to the grave, but his brain remains more active in the world’s service than that of the youngster under forty, who develops the muscle in his arms at the expense of the gray matter in his brain. It is only the callow youth who suffers from softening of the brain. The man at sixty has more dollars in his cellar and more sense in his garret than the fool of thirty has cents in his pocket. Yet youth and age are not antagonistic; they are like the two parts of a pair of scissors in the work of the world: ‘useless each without the other.’”
“Don’t you think that Dr. Osler promulgated his theory of earthly eradication at the suggestion of a feminine relative?”
“That would not be surprising. Women are apt to see the defects of an aged man of talent and the merits of a young fool. It is possible that some woman in the Osler family is weary of being an old man’s darling and wants to squeeze him out, unless he can produce the elixir of Faust.”
“That’s the solution. The women are determined to have something to squeeze, even if they have to stifle their embraces in chloroform and let their affections go to ‘weeds.’ Woman is a poppy that exhales her perfume only in the shade. It may be that somebody else has said that after me, for Osler implies that the oldest inhabitant is only a reminiscence of what isn’t so. Who was the author, Bartlett?”
“That is not a ‘Familiar Quotation,’” answered Bartlett, after a hurried consultation with Dr. Johnson and Roget. “Therefore, it must belong to Anon; he claims everything to which other people cannot prove their title. It seems to me that you are getting so independent that you even rebel against your metaphors. You call woman a fragrant poppy in the shade, in apparent ignorance of the fact that in Hades, where all women have shady characters, there is no perfume. You poets can scent everything but the bloom of truth.”
“Oh, well, you’re not so fragrant,” said Anon, slangily. “You only gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, while I furnished the thread which bound them. But we have lost the thread of this discourse. It seems to me that if the lethal chamber were to become popular, a man would have to begin putting his affairs in order almost as soon as he had ceased to ask his mother-in-law if he might kiss his wife.”
“That’s one thing which has struck me as odd,” I said. “What particular place of torment has been reserved for the mothers-in-law? I haven’t seen one since I came to Hades.”
“Nor are you likely to do so,” chuckled Anon. “Mothers-in-law go to Paradise without any preliminary probation. Adam had no mother-in-law, you know, so he insisted that he wasn’t going to put up with any one’s else. Lucifer was glad to accede to Adam’s request for banishing these marital appendages, for he feared that if he allowed the mothers-in-law to enter Hades, he would be out of a job within twenty-four hours. No man ever doubted that his wife’s mother could outpoint the devil.”
I glanced in alarm at Dr. Roget, who appeared to be choking, but soon I discovered that he was merely swallowing half a dozen pages of his “Thesaurus” preparatory to communicating his ideas to us. He spoke slowly, biting off a word, chewing it until it was thoroughly digested, and then spitting it forth with the retort of a verbal bomb. His speech lasted as long as the paper held out, which he later explained by saying that he never could speak without notes.