“We’ll see.”
Miss Gage stared, and Mrs. March said—
“I didn’t suppose the House of Pansa would lead to shop with you two.”
“You never can tell which way copy lies,” I returned; and I asked the girl, “What should you think, Miss Gage, of a little paper with a thread of story, but mostly talk, on a supposititious Pompeian cottage?”
“I don’t believe I understand,” said she, far too remote from our literary interests, as I saw, to be ashamed of her ignorance.
“There!” I said to Kendricks. “Do you think the general public would?”
“Miss Gage isn’t the general public,” said my wife, who had followed the course of my thought; her tone implied that Miss Gage was wiser and better.
“Would you allow yourself to be drawn,” I asked, “dreamily issuing from an aisle of the pine grove as the tutelary goddess of a Pompeian cottage?”
The girl cast a bewildered glance at my wife, who said, “You needn’t pay any attention to him, Miss Gage. He has an idea that he is making a joke.”
We felt that we had done enough for one afternoon, when we had done the House of Pansa, and I proposed that we should go and sit down in Congress Park and listen to the Troy band. I was not without the hope that it would play “Washington Post.”