—The p'int 's carried,—said the Member of the Haouse.
Will you let me look at that book a single minute?—said the Scarabee. I passed it to him, wondering what in the world he wanted of Paradise Lost.
Dermestes lardarius,—he said, pointing to a place where the edge of one side of the outer cover had been slightly tasted by some insect.—Very fond of leather while they 're in the larva state.
—Damage the goods as bad as mice,—said the Salesman.
—Eat half the binding off Folio 67,—said the Register of Deeds. Something did, anyhow, and it was n't mice. Found the shelf covered with little hairy cases belonging to something or other that had no business there.
Skins of the Dermestes lardaraus,—said the Scarabee,—you can always tell them by those brown hairy coats. That 's the name to give them.
—What good does it do to give 'em a name after they 've eat the binding off my folios?—asked the Register of Deeds.
The Scarabee had too much respect for science to answer such a question as that; and the book, having served its purposes, was passed back to the Lady.
I return to the previous question,—said I,—if our friend the Member of the House of Representatives will allow me to borrow the phrase. Womanly women are very kindly critics, except to themselves and now and then to their own sex. The less there is of sex about a woman, the more she is to be dreaded. But take a real woman at her best moment,—well dressed enough to be pleased with herself, not so resplendent as to be a show and a sensation, with those varied outside influences which set vibrating the harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air about her, and what has social life to compare with one of those vital interchanges of thought and feeling with her that make an hour memorable? What can equal her tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of apprehension, her quickness to feel the changes of temperature as the warm and cool currents of talk blow by turns? At one moment she is microscopically intellectual, critical, scrupulous in judgment as an analyst's balance, and the next as sympathetic as the open rose that sweetens the wind from whatever quarter it finds its way to her bosom. It is in the hospitable soul of a woman that a man forgets he is a stranger, and so becomes natural and truthful, at the same time that he is mesmerized by all those divine differences which make her a mystery and a bewilderment to—
If you fire your popgun at me, you little chimpanzee, I will stick a pin right through the middle of you and put you into one of this gentleman's beetle-cases!