"But why isn't my conscience as practical as my clothes?" persisted
Madeline. "And why is the fortune made to-day in Montana mines and lost
to-morrow in Wall Street any more practical than this same majestic
march of the centuries and the great thoughts that circle about it?
'Practical' is such a foolish word, Dick."
"Undoubtedly, to you," said Dick with a little sneer. "But to most of
the race to which we have the honor to belong it is the word that makes
the dictionary heavy. It is because you do not know its meaning that you
women, or perhaps I ought to use the despised term, 'ladies,' become the
very beautiful and useless articles that you are--works of art, which
may thrill and charm a man for a moment, when he has time to look at
them, but which bear little relation to the stress of life which you can
not comprehend."
"Dick!" Madeline spoke almost with tears in her eyes. "It is not like
you to have a fling at women."
"You see I'm gathering wisdom as I go along."
"Gathering idiocy, you mean," interposed Mr. Lenox. "Dick, you young
fool, the ideal woman is the goal toward which the rest of humanity must
run; and the sooner you bend all your practical faculties in that
direction, and there abase the knee, the better for you."
He nodded down the table toward his wife, and she pursed up her lips and
said, "You nice goose! That's the way to keep us sweet-tempered."
"I hope you're not going to turn cynic, Dick," said Ellery. "The rôle
does not fit you."
"A cynic," interposed Mrs. Lenox, "always thinks that he has discovered
the sourness of the world. In reality all he has found is his own bad
digestion. I should hate to think there was anything on my table to
cause acute indigestion, Dick."
"Perhaps there is a cog loose in his brain so that his wheels do not
work together," added Ellery.
"At any rate, cynicism is self-confessed failure; so don't give way to
it," Mr. Lenox concluded.
"Oh, I give up. Spare me," cried Dick.
Mrs. Lenox rose with a little nod, and as Madeline swept past him
towards the door, Dick turned for an instant and stopped her
laughingly.
"Forgive me," he said. "I did not mean it. I felt like saying something
obnoxious."
"But you always used to want to be nice, Dick," she answered.
"Miss Elton," Mrs. Percival spoke severely, as a matron to a heedless
girl, "perhaps the gentlemen would prefer to have their smoke alone. Are
you coming to the drawing-room with us?"
Later, much later, Lena, in the privacy of her own room, awaited the
coming of her husband who seemed to her to prolong outrageously the game
of billiards which made his excuse for sitting up a little longer than
herself. She shook out her fluff of hair, and arrayed herself in a
bewildering pink dressing-gown from beneath which she toasted some very
pink toes before the fire. She knew what arguments told on the masculine
intellect. And at last Dick came.