"Ah!" The doctor smiled absently, and re-bent his brows over the page, protruding his lips in a vicious pout as he read.
"He disdains to notice the slander," resumed Mrs. Baxter, unabashed at her failure to elicit a conjugal compliment. "Seriously, Mr. Wyllys, I am thankful for the guidance of reason and will that counterbalance my mercurial temperament. My spirit resembles nothing else so much as a mettled steed, whose curvettings are restrained by an inexorable rein. But for my sober judgment, Impulse would have led me into an erratic course, I fear."
Relaxing the tension of the fingers and wrist that had pulled hard at an imaginary curb, and unclenching the teeth from their bite upon the word "inexorable," she sighed, reflectively.
"The combination is rare—" commenced the gentleman.
"It is preposterous!" ejaculated the doctor, closing the Russian-leather album with a concussion like the report of a pocket-pistol.
"I think not, dear," said the wife, gently corrective. "It is, as Mr. Wyllys says, a rare combination, but certainly not an impossible one."
"It is preposterous," reiterated the doctor, with a ruinous tug at his cravat, "that a rational creature, who can read and write, should waste time in disfiguring good, honest paper with such incongruous, not to say blasphemous, nonsense as I find here. It was bad enough for mediæval monks to deck the Word of Life in the motley wear of a harlequin. Greek, German, black-letter text, are, all of them, stumbling-blocks to the unlearned, diversions to the thoughtless. But when the sacred Scriptures are bedizened into further illegibility by paint and gilding, and illustrated by birds, beasts, and even fishes, daubed upon fields, azure, argent, and verde, the offence becomes an abomination. Such profanation is offered that divinest of pastorals, the twenty-third psalm, in this volume," elevating it in strong disgust.
Mrs. Baxter arose and took it from his hand in time to save it from being tossed to the table or floor.
"Tastes differ, my dear husband," was all she said, but her forbearance and real sweetness of temper called forth a look of unfeigned respect from the amused spectator.
"I wouldn't keep it in the parlor, if I were in your place, Jane," the doctor expostulated, seeing her deposit the folio upon a stand beyond his reach.