“It is obvious that you support the Eighteenth Amendment with reservations.”
“With a diplomatic reserve,” he corrected, chuckling. Willys, who had penetrated the “reserve,” laughed. And Cornelia, crushing a smile between her lips, entered into a rather needless explanation, of which the intention, I perceived, was to dissipate any uneasiness which a Mid-Western Puritan might be conceived to feel on his abrupt introduction to a wet New Year’s Eve.
“Monsieur”—meaning Oliver—“is a little naughty,” she said, “and he likes to make himself appear worse than he is. You must remember that he is practically a European.”
“Oh, nonsense!” I exclaimed. “Oliver a European! Then so was Andy Jackson.”
“Yes,” Cornelia insisted, “his tastes and habits were formed in the earlier part of his life, when he was almost constantly abroad. His best friends in Washington are men in the legations who aren’t obliged to adopt our reforms. Naturally, when he entertains them here, he doesn’t wish to seem inhospitable or absurd, like poor dear Mr. Bryan. We don’t ordinarily have wine on the table for our own guests—I mean outside the semiofficial connection. But just for to-night, as it’s a holiday, and one of you is a pilgrim from the Mid-West, Oliver thought—we thought—that you would appreciate it if ambassadorial privileges were extended to you.”
“I get the point perfectly,” I said; “that’s Oliver’s point of view—or one of his points of view. But please let Janus defend himself. He will need practice before we Puritans are done with him. But now that the theme is before us, Cornelia, won’t you give us the benefit of your own point of view?”
“My point of view?” Cornelia smiled her Mona Lisa smile. “I—oh, I am Oliver’s wife!”
“I have often regretted that,” I replied with a consciously provincial affectation of urban daring; “but knowing your strict old-fashioned convictions about marriage, I stifle my regrets. I can’t quite reconcile your indulgent humor this evening with your rigorously prohibitive principles regarding—well, the moral fluidity of such novels as Willys writes. I had hoped that your conservatism, your Puritanism, as they call it, on the marriage question would bring you around to our position on prohibition, and so, in that respect at least, detach you from Oliver.”
“You are dead wrong, Professor,” Willys interjected, “you are muddled. Prohibition isn’t conservatism. It is radical innovation. It isn’t Puritanism. As you yourself have admirably demonstrated, the Puritans drank like fishes. I am a Puritan. So is His Excellency. We are Conservatives. So is our hostess.”
“Your don’t read my articles, Willys,” I said, “as carefully as I read your novels. What I demonstrated was, that the Puritan is a radical innovator. The Puritan of our day says, ‘Let the dry land appear.’ You are not a Puritan; you are a Fundamentalist. You wish to return to the Flood. You are a Diluvian.”