A QUESTION OF COURTESY.

"Permit me, Sir, to pass you the potatoes."

"After you," I inclined.

My fellow-passenger helped himself, shrugging his eyebrows. It was a provocative shrug—a shrug I could not leave at that.

"You shrug your eyebrows," I challenged.

"A thousand pardons," he answered; "but one never escapes it."

He courted interrogation. "What is it that one never escapes?" I asked.

"The elaborate unselfishness of the age," he replied a little petulantly. "I had two friends who starved to death of it."

"Indeed!" I offered him the salt.