"That's bully!" he said. "Will you tell me some more, some other time, Mr. Abercrombie?"
"Certainly, my boy," said Abercrombie. "It is well that we should become acquainted with natural history, and in the simple tales I tell you I shall endeavor at all times to introduce such information as will increase your store of knowledge. Above all, we must get acquainted with natural history."
He paused. The boy had nothing to say. Unfortunately, nobody else had anything to say. To Abercrombie the silence seemed, in a vague way that he could not fully comprehend, destructive. There was something the matter with the atmosphere and he knew it. The gloaming had drifted into darkness, and he could no longer see either his prospective father-in-law or mother-in-law or his sweetheart. He knew only that, as an adviser of parents of the younger male offspring of the two who were also parents of his one object in life, he had flashed presumptuously in the pan, that, too, in the dimness of the gathering darkness, when people are most reflective and that he had accomplished the possibility irretrievable.
The silence was broken at last by the voice of Mrs. Dobson. The voice was thin and didn't seem to really "break" the silence. It seemed to split it neatly.
"Are those your ideas, Mr. Abercrombie, as to the sort of knowledge of natural history which should be conveyed to young children?"
"Yes, I'd like to know, myself," added Mr. Dobson.
Not a laugh, not a comment, not a sound came from the corner where sat Miss Frances Dobson. She was strictly an aside.
Abercrombie pondered through swift seconds. He was in what, in his own mind—so much are we addicted to the pernicious habit of thinking in the vernacular—'in a hole'. But, the man at bay has frequently proved a hero in a plain North American way. Abercrombie arose to the occasion!
"It may be," he said, "that in the telling to Erastus of these simple tales, I have not followed precisely the practices of those generally engaged in the teaching of youth. It may be that I have not instructed him in the manner in which I might have done had I allowed a few years to lapse and my beard to grow longer and had shaved my upper lip. It may be that in the tales I have told Erastus there are certain discrepancies, synchronisms, and anachronisms. My pictures may have possessed a shade too much of the impressionist character. But what of it? What I wanted to do was to give Erastus a general idea of Black Forests, Witches, and Boa Constrictors."
Silence reigned again, and reigned very thoroughly for some time. Then up rose the modern young woman.