“You make me think of those interminable English novels, which begin with the infancy of the hero, and get through public school at page three hundred and something!”
“But, my dear, there is some old literature that people are really interested in. The Bible for example—”
“The Hundred Best Books! Number two, Homer; number three, Shakespeare; Number four, Paradise Lost—”
“But you overlook the fact—the Bible is a best-seller!”
“The people who buy it are not people who read about art, or would ever hear of a book on art theories. They are people like Mamma! Once upon a time a book-agent offered her a set of the World’s Great Orations, and she decided the dark red leather binding would go well with the draperies in the drawing-room. Then a couple of weeks later came another man, selling a set of books in dark green cloth. She decided these would match the decorations in the billiard-room, so she bought them also, and it wasn’t until afterwards that somebody noticed the family had two sets of the same World’s Great Orations!”
“But, my dear, there really is literature in the Bible.”
“People have been told about literature in the Bible since they were children in Sunday school, and there’s no idea in the whole world that bores them quite so much.”
“But that’s exactly the point! That’s what this book is for—to show how real literature was alive in its own day, and is just as much alive in the present day. Don’t you see what a fascinating theme: they had in Judea the very same class struggle—”
There has come that fanatical light into his eyes which Mrs. Ogi knows so well; he means to make her sit and listen to a whole chapter—and when she has the laundry to count, and the apples to boil for his supper! “Go ahead and write it,” she says, in a weary voice. “But take my advice and jazz it up!”
So Ogi goes away and postpones his exposition of the successive emergence of social classes; and instead of an impressive title such as “Agrarian Revolt in Ancient Judea,” he begins—