"I see. It wouldn't be the real thing unless there were little ones to gallop through the corridors at six in the morning and weep at the dinner table. What are the life-works?"
"One is writing a book, I understand, on The Equality of the Sexes. The other—oh, Allan, it's too funny."
"Spring it," he demanded.
"She's trying to have cornet-playing introduced into the public schools. She says that tuberculosis and pneumonia are caused by insufficient lung development, and that cornet-playing will develop the lungs of the rising generation. Fancy going by a school during the cornet hour."
"I don't know why they shouldn't put cornet-playing into the schools," he observed, after a moment of profound thought. "Everything else is there now. Why shouldn't they teach crime, and even make a fine art of it?"
"If you let her know you're a doctor," cautioned Eloise, "she'll corner you, and I shall never see you again. She says that she 'hopes, incidentally, to enlist the sympathies of the medical profession.'"
"She's beginning at the wrong end. Cornet manufacturers and the people who keep sanitariums and private asylums are the co-workers she wants. I couldn't live through the coming Winter were it not for pneumonia. It means coal, and repairs for the automobile, and furs for my wife—when I get one."
"Come," said Eloise, springing to her feet; "let's go up and get ready for luncheon."
"Have you told me all?" asked Allan, "or is there some gay young troubadour who serenades you in the evening and whose existence you conceal from me for reasons of your own?"
A Pathetic Little Woman