THE SECRET
Eve was bored. She confided the fact to the Serpent.
“Tell me something new!” she wailed, and the Serpent—he had never seen a lady cry before—was deeply moved (the Serpent has always been misjudged) and—there being no National Board of Censors—told her everything he knew.
When he had finished, Eve yawned and looked boreder than ever. “Is that all?” she said.
The Dramatic Critic asks the same question on the first night of a new Play—“Will there never be an end to these Dormitory Farces,” he moans, pondering darkly the while how he may transmute its leaden dullness to the precious gold of a scintillating paragraph.
Father Time has nothing to say on the matter. If you ask him to show you a new thing, he shrugs his wings and growls, “You can search me.” Things old and things new are all alike to Father Time.
Peradventure, in the uttermost recess of the Great Pyramid lies a hair of an unknown color, or a blueprint of the fourth dimension, or better still the ms. of a new play, or a joke that has never been cracked.
When a Roman bath is unearthed in Kent or a milliner’s shop in Pompeii we wait breathless to hear of the discovery of a new story, or a new dress pattern, but always it is the same old skull, the same old amphora.
Even the newness of Fashion is a jest of antiquity.