“But,” said the Altrurian, “if you are forbidden by motives of humanity from doing any sort of manual labor, which you must leave to those who live by it, I suppose you take some sort of exercise?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Makely, shaking her head gayly, “we prefer to take medicine.”
“You must approve of that,” I said to the Altrurian, “as you consider exercise for its own sake insane or immoral. But, Mrs. Makely,” I entreated, “you’re giving me away at a tremendous rate. I have just been telling Mr. Homos that you ladies go in for athletics so much now in your summer outings that there is danger of your becoming physically as well as intellectually superior to us poor fellows. Don’t take that consolation from me.”
“I won’t, altogether,” she said. “I couldn’t have the heart to, after the pretty way you’ve put it. I don’t call it very athletic, sitting around on hotel piazzas all summer long, as nineteen-twentieths of us do. But I don’t deny that there is a Remnant, as Matthew Arnold calls them, who do go in for tennis and boating and bathing and tramping and climbing.” She paused, and then she concluded, gleefully: “And you ought to see what wrecks they get home in the fall!”
The joke was on me; I could not help laughing, though I felt rather sheepish before the Altrurian. Fortunately, he did not pursue the inquiry; his curiosity had been given a slant aside from it.
“But your ladies,” he asked, “they have the summer for rest, however they use it. Do they generally leave town? I understood Mr. Twelvemough to say so,” he added, with a deferential glance at me.
“Yes, you may say it is the universal custom in the class that can afford it,” said Mrs. Makely. She proceeded as if she felt a tacit censure in his question. “It wouldn’t be the least use for us to stay and fry through our summers in the city simply because our fathers and brothers had to. Besides, we are worn out, at the end of the season, and they want us to come away as much as we want to come.”
“Ah, I have always heard that the Americans are beautiful in their attitude toward women.”
“They are perfect dears,” said Mrs. Makely, “and here comes one of the best of them.”
At that moment her husband came up and laid her shawl across her shoulders. “Whose character is it you’re blasting?” he asked, jocosely.