“Forbidden fruit,” scowled Adam.
“There was a time,” I observed, “when I thought it better to welcome the sting of a wasp rather than the kiss of a woman, but that was before I had come in contact with a wasp and before I had been kissed by a woman. Both have taught me that I knew neither wasps nor women and that all things alliterative are not synonymous.”
Adam seemed anxious to change the subject from osculation to the origin of things kissable, and to a man, of course, the only things kissable are sweet little bits of laughing gurgling femininity.
“Doubtless you would be interested in my first impressions of my helpmeet,” he said, “so I will give you the Genesis of Revelation. When I was a boy—”
“He always gets childish after dinner,” whispered Eve in an aside to me. Adam filled in the interruption by whittling on a toothpick. “I’m glad he has a plentiful stock of lumber, for if you can keep him whittling, you can get everything out of him except the truth. He thinks he cuts a chunk out of history every time he flourishes his jack-knife. The shavings he sells to the breakfast-food trust.”
“When I was a boy,” continued Adam, “I invariably spoke in the first person, because I was the first person, but as Eve is my better half I am now only a third, so in future I will not even use the editorial ‘we,’ but simply ‘the man’.”
“And the man said, ‘The woman’—” mocked Cain.
“You’re not in America, where the children bring up the parents,” reproved Eve. “Besides, your information is but second-hand, for you were ‘among those absent’.”
“Eve was bone of my bone,” continued Adam, “but not flesh of my flesh. When I first set eyes on the woman she had not enough adipose tissue to impair in an infinitesimal degree the rapid penetration of an X-ray; in fact, from Cosmos to Cleopatra, woman has evaded the searching inquiry of the X and is still an unknown quantity.”
“And the apple episode?” I questioned.