"That might teach you, Miss Elton," said Mr. Preston, "the futility of
trying to improve women by reason. Now a man--"
"Oh, pooh, reason! reason!" exclaimed Mrs. Lenox, turning upon him, "I'm
sorry for you poor men, you mistaken servants of boasted reason! Reason
is the biggest fallacy on earth. It leads men by the straight path of
logic to pure foolishness."
"And how is your woman's reason to account for that?" he asked
tolerantly.
"Oh, I suppose your premises are never true. Or, if they are, another
man's opposite premises are equally true. So there you are. Two
contradictions are equally valid, but being a reasonable man you can't
see more than one of them."
"And women can see both sides, of course."
"Truly. And flop from one to the other with lightning rapidity. We are
too completely superior to reason to have any respect for or reliance on
it. Do you think I try reason on my husband when he is in the wrong in
his arguments with me! Not at all. I just say, 'I'm afraid you are not
feeling well, dear.' And I put a mustard plaster on him. It's
extraordinary how seldom he disagrees nowadays. Or when he's very
obstinately set on an objectionable course, it's a good plan to say
sweetly, 'I'll do just as you like, dear.' He invariably comes back with
an emphatic, 'No--we'll do as you like.'"
"I relinquish all claims to be called a reasonable being," said Mr.
Lenox with a wry face.
"When we, the unmarried, hear confessions of this kind," said Madeline,
"it gives us an incongruous feeling to remember how happy you, the
married, seem, after all."
"Getting along becomes a habit," retorted Dick. "Matrimony is like
taking opium. It fixes itself on you. I suppose when the hero of
Kipling's poem found out that she was only 'a rag and a bone and a hank
of hair,' he kept on loving the rag, even while he felt like gnawing the
bone and pulling the hair."
He knew he had said an ugly thing. It wasn't like him. He flushed as he
saw Mrs. Lenox glance sharply at him.
"Dick, Dick, that is heresy," she exclaimed gaily. "We must pretend
there aren't any vampires, and that we do not know what they are made
of. If we tell the naked truth, how can we cry out with conviction that
the old world is an harmonious and beautiful place?"
"That isn't your real philosophy," he said.
"No, it isn't," she said. "I sometimes wish it were. If one could have
the temperament to shut one's eyes and say, 'I don't see it; therefore
it isn't true,' what a very easy thing life would be."
"I don't know," answered Dick. "Going it blind with a dog and a string
doesn't generally make it easier to walk."