"What do you mean—take it so much to heart?" Abe protested. "I take a glass of schnapps once in a while, Mawruss, but so far as I am concerned this here Prohibition can come into effect this afternoon yet, and it wouldn't affect me none."
"I am the same way, Abe. I can drink and I can leave it alone," Morris said. "Or, anyhow, I think I can."
XVIII
BEING UP IN THE AIR, AS APPLIED TO TRANSATLANTIC FLIGHTS, CROWN JEWELS, AND LEAGUE OF NATIONS SPEECHES
"The way I feel about it is this, Mawruss," Abe Potash said to his partner, Morris Perlmutter: "It don't make no difference if them two boys failed in their intentions, y'understand, they succeeded in making millions and millions of people in Paris, Winnipeg, New York, and who knows where not, stop hating each other for anyhow a few hours, and instead they smiled and shook hands and allowed themselves a recess in their regular work of winning strikes, losing strikes, shooting, starving, and cheating each other and their countries, while they all joined in being glad that Mrs. Hawker and the baby had got the popper back home with them and that Grieve was safe with his family or anyhow as safe as a young feller can be who is liable to quit his home at any moment and do the same wonderful, foolish thing all over again."
"It's too bad that all them strikers and Bolsheviks which is acting as senselessly as children, couldn't also act as sensibly as children, Abe," Morris Perlmutter observed, "and stop crying long enough to forget what they were crying about, y'understand, but they won't. They are bound and determined to eat the goose which lays the golden eggs, Abe, and the end is going to be that they will find out it ain't a goose at all, but that instead of killing a goose that's fit for food they have only smashed an incubator that's fit for nothing but laying more eggs, and that's the way it goes."
"Well, it's certainly wonderful how popular them two young fellers become in the course of a few days, Mawruss," Abe declared. "Which makes you think, Mawruss, if such a thing happens to two unknown young men like Hawker and Grieve, there is big possibilities in this cross-the-ocean flight for fellers which was once highly thought of and which nowadays nobody gives a nickel about. Take, for instance, them two William J. fellers, Bryan and McAdoo, which only a short time since people was reading about it in the papers, Mawruss, and what them fellers should ought to do is to hire a good, undependable airyoplane, y'understand, and take the first boat for Trespassing, or whatever the place is. Then all they have to do is to make a good start, and get afterwards rescued by a tramp steamer, and right away they become general favorites again. Or the kaiser and the crown prince might try it, Mawruss. There must be plenty of airyoplanes laying around Germany nowadays which could be picked up for a song, and when word come that it had fallen into the Atlantic Ocean with them two birds aboard somewhere around one thousand five hundred miles from sixty degrees forty-three minutes, y'understand, it might make the Hohenzollerns so popular that there would be a counter-revolution or something."
"But suppose they would overdo the thing and not get rescued," Morris suggested.