"That's it. It destroys your eyesight, I believe, and loses decimal point something of its volume in a hundred thousand years. There is no doubt we are on the brink of great discoveries."
"How very interesting! I wish the lecturer would begin. Oh—here he is!"
"Very bald feller! He ought to use petrol. You have to rub it in and keep out of the way of artificial light. This chap's first cousin lost the use of both legs through investigatin'. It was X-rays, I believe. You may depend on it we've got a deal to learn." And so on.
Upon the honour of the narrative this sample is a fair one of what passed between this lady and gentleman on this occasion. There was more, but it was exactly the same sort.
In due course the lecture was begun and ended; then the discussion followed, and Mrs. Godfrey Pybus and her six daughters didn't stop to hear Miss Volumnia Bax's analysis and refutation, but went away in the middle and made a noise on purpose. It was just like them, and they were perfectly odious people.
It is most extraordinary how Time will slip away when the catching hold of his forelock depends on ourselves. Each morning may bring that forelock again within reach, and each morning the same apathy that made us yesterday too languid to stretch out a hand and grip the old scamp and employ him for our own advantage keeps us in the same stupid abeyance, and we lose the chance for another twenty-four hours. Every postponement makes a new precedent, and every new precedent stiffens the back of inaction.
It was so with Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Aiken. Not a morning passed without an unfulfilled impulse on either part to cross the gulf between them, and terminate their idiotic separation, bridged by correspondence which really did more harm than good. There is one precept which it is quite impossible for the human race to observe too closely—Never write letters! If only those words could replace Little Liver Pills and so forth on those atrocities that flank the railways and hide the planet, its inhabitants would be the gainers. Mr. Reginald had an extraordinary faculty for undoing in a postscript any little concession he had made at the outset, and Mrs. Euphemia, for her part, was becoming quite a proficient in sarcasm—three-line whips of scorpions describes her style, or the style she aimed at. For a superficial literary education did not help her up to its perfection.
"Very good, Mrs. Hay!"—thus, on receipt of a letter, would run her husband's commentary, embodying transposed quotation in its text, "'Pray go my own way'—that's it, is it?—'On no account give the slightest consideration underlined to the wishes of your underlined wife.' Oh, very well—I won't. 'If my Conscience with a big C didn't turn a deaf ear to the pleadings of my Better Self with a big B and a big S'—what's all this? can't read it—oh! I see—yes, at least I see what it comes to!—I should come to my sences—spelt wrong—and overcome the ridiculous false pride that stands between me and something or other underlined—h'm! h'm!—'consult my own dignity'—h'm, h'm—something's something else I can't make out in the truest sence of the word, underlined. I dare say. I know what all this rot comes to in the end. I'm to go and ask forgiveness and show contrition, and I shouldn't wonder if I was expected to beg Aunt Priscilla's pardon. And be taken to Church, as like as not! I say, Stumpy, that would be rather jolly, wouldn't it? Fancy the Wicked Man turnething away from his Wickedness and Aunt Priscilla taking care visibly not to look at your humble servant, so as not to hurt his feelings!"
"I tell you what, Crocky,"—thus Mr. Hughes, on the occasion the above is chosen from, some time in November—"I tell you what: if I was you, I shouldn't be an Ass. Just you mozey off to Athabasca Villa and make it up. I believe Mrs. Gapp's right."
"That old sot been talking? Parples was the best of the two. I'll have Parples back." For Mrs. Gapp had taken Mrs. Parples' place, under pretence of greater accomplishments and better training.