Mrs. Ogi has been silent for some time; saving her energies in anticipation of that greatest satisfaction known to wives. Now she takes it. “I told you so!”
“What did you tell me?” asks Ogi, uneasily.
“You have filled up a book, and haven’t got in a word about Gloria Swanson’s salary, nor what Rupert Hughes really got for ‘The Sins of Hollywood’!”
“It’s this way,” says her husband. “I found I had so much material that I’d have to make two volumes, one dealing with the artists of the past, and the other with living artists.”
“I remember, eight years ago,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you started out to write a criticism of the world’s culture in one volume; and presently you came to me looking worried, and said you had so much about Religion it would need a volume to itself. So you took a hundred thousand words for Religion. And when you started after Journalism, and took a hundred thousand words to tell the story of your own life, and another hundred thousand to tell about the newspapers. And then Education; you came again and said you had so much about the colleges, you’d have to give a whole volume to them. You took two hundred and five thousand words for the colleges, and then a hundred and ninety-five thousand for the schools!”
As Ogi has no answer to this indictment, she continues: “Just what do you think you’ve written now?”
“I’ve written a text-book of culture.”
“For the schools?”—very sarcastically.
“It will be serving as a text-book in the high schools of Russia within six months.”
“In Russia, yes—”