"Why? Every one marries—and John and I are very happy…. Come; there are some people I don't want to meet."
As they descended the steps into the murky light of the noisy city,
Isabelle remarked:—
"Don't forget to-night, promptly at seven,—we are going to the theatre afterwards. I shall show you some of our smart people and let you see if they aren't more interesting than the mob."
She nodded gayly and drove off. As she went to a luncheon engagement, she thought of Vickers, of Fosdick's remarks about living, and a great wave of dissatisfaction swept over her. "It's this ugly city," she said to herself, letting down the window. "Or it's nerves again,—I must do something!" That phrase was often on her lips these days. In her restlessness nothing seemed just right,—she was ever trying to find something beyond the horizon. As Fosdick would have said, "The race vitality being exhausted in its primitive force, nothing has come to take its place." But at luncheon she was gay and talkative, the excitement of human contact stimulating her. And afterwards she packed the afternoon with trivial engagements until it was time to dress for her guests.
The dinner and the theatre might have passed off uneventfully, if it had not been for Fosdick. That unwieldy social vessel broke early in the dinner. Isabelle had placed him next Mrs. Leason because the lady liked celebrities, and Fosdick, having lately been put gently but firmly beyond the confines of the Tzar's realm for undue intimacy with the rebellious majority of the Tzar's subjects, might be counted such. For the time being he had come to a momentary equilibrium in the city of his birth. Fosdick and Mrs. Leason seemed to find common ground, while the other men, the usual speechless contingent of tired business men, allowed themselves to be talked at by the women. Presently Fosdick's voice boomed forth:—
"Let me tell you a story which will illustrate my point, Mrs. Leason. Some years ago I was riding through the Kentucky mountains, and after a wretched luncheon in one of the log-and-mud huts I was sitting on the bench in front of the cabin trying to make peace with my digestion. The ground in that spot sloped down towards me, and on the side of this little hill there lay a large hog, a razor-back sow. There were eight little pigs clustered in voracious attitudes about her, and she could supply but six at a time,—I mean that she was provided by nature with but six teats."
Mrs. Leason visibly moved away from her neighbor, and for the rest of his story Fosdick had a silent dinner table.
"The mother was asleep," Fosdick continued, turning his great head closer to Mrs. Leason, "probably attending to her digestion as I was to mine, and she left her offspring to fight it out among themselves for the possession of her teats. There was a lively scrap, a lot of hollerin' and squealin' from that bunch of porkers, grunts from the ins and yaps from the outs, you know. Every now and then one of the outs would make a flying start, get a wedge in and take a nip, forcing some one of his brothers out of the heap so that he would roll down the hill into the path. Up he'd get and start over, and maybe he would dislodge some other porker. And the old sow kept grunting and sleeping peacefully in the sun while her children got their dinner in the usual free-fight fashion.
"Now," Fosdick raised his heavy, square-pointed finger and shook it at the horrified Mrs. Leason and also across the table, noticing what seemed to him serious interest in his allegory, "I observed that there was a difference among those little porkers,—some were fat and some were peaked, and the peaked fellers got little show at the mother. Now what I ask myself is,—were they weak because they couldn't manage to get a square feed, or were they hustled out more than the others because they were naturally weak? I leave that to my friends the sociologists to determine—"
"Isabella," Lane interposed from his end of the table, "if Mr. Fosdick has finished his pig story, perhaps—"