Have you ever, in a big hotel where an orchestra played after dinner, noticed the faces listening to the music? Sometimes in those orchestras there are men who can play. I have seen some of our brothers saying in their inner consciousness, and almost unknown to the part of their minds which they are using at the moment, “Queer beggars, by Jove! makin’ chunes and fiddlin’ away there. Curious sort of life it must be workin’ a stick up and down on a string made out of some por brute’s inside! wonderful how they manage to keep it up—La da, da de da, pretty little thing that. Tomkins is a deuced shrewd feller the way he handled that contract—” and their thoughts go wandering off again. So I have wandered off myself; but this pigeon-holing of people is a habit I have learned here for the first time. I never knew before how much you and I pigeon-holed merchants and their kind as miserly and uneducated persons, just as they pigeon-hole us as queer beggars with eccentric hair and polygamous habits. When we got home I explained all this to Mr. Merchant, and we spent an evening of vigorous discussion. He rolled me over, so to speak (I have got into the way of explaining all forms of hyperbole), and trampled on me.
“What you long-haired chaps don’t see—” he began.
“Now, if I am to stop calling you and your friends fat you must stop calling mine long-haired,” I interrupted.
“Very well,” he agreed, “but what you and your friends don’t see is that there must be different kinds of people to keep things going. You can’t have every one alike.”
“God forbid!” I said, “no one ever suggested it.”
“Now suppose one of your long-haired friends came into my office—”
“Yes,” I said, “or suppose one of your fat friends came into my studio—”
“Just so,” he replied. “Well, they’d both be fish out of water, wouldn’t they?”
“In a state of chaos,” I explained, “animals, birds, fishes and so on lived together, and such as could not agree ate each other in silence. Later in history they became civilized and masqueraded in one another’s skins, and we are led to hope that, by and by, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and the merchant and the cockatrice——”
The angry butler came in just then and Mrs. Merchant gave a slight cough and frowned at me, so we never finished our discussion. I shall be sorry to leave them.