"Ah, but I don't particularly care to write about a subject of which I am so totally ignorant, dear. Besides, it isn't for you to fleer and gibe at a masterpiece which you never read," he airily informed her.
"I am saving it up for next summer, Felix, when I will have a chance to give every word of it the reverence it deserves. I really don't have any time for reading nowadays. There is always something more important that has to be attended to – For instance, the gasoline engine isn't working again, and I had to 'phone in town for Slaytor to send a man out to-day, to see what is the matter this time."
"And it is messy things like that you want me to write about!" he exclaimed. "About the gasoline engine going on another strike, and Drake's forgetting to tell you we were all out of sugar until late Saturday night! Never mind, Mrs. Kennaston! you will be sorry for this, and you will weep the bitter tears of unavailing repentance, some day, when you ride in the front automobile with the Governor to the unveiling of my various monuments, and have fallen into the anecdotage of a great man's widow." He spoke lightly, but he was reflecting that in reality Kathleen did not read his book because she did not regard any of his doings very seriously. "Isn't this the third time this week we have had herring for breakfast?" he inquired, pleasantly. "I think I will wait and let them scramble me a couple of eggs. It is evidently a trifle that has escaped your attention, my darling, during our long years of happy married life, that I don't eat herring. But of course, just as you say, you have a number of much more important things than husbands to think about. I dislike having to put any one to any extra trouble on my account; but as it happens, I have a lot of work to do this morning, and I cannot very well get through it on an empty stomach."
"We haven't had it since Saturday, Felix." Then wearily, to the serving-girl, "Cora, see if Mr. Kennaston can have some eggs… I wish you wouldn't upset things so, Felix. Your coffee will get stone-cold; and it is hard enough to keep servants as it is. Besides, you know perfectly well to-day is Thursday, and the library has to be thorough-cleaned."
"That means of course I am to be turned out-of-doors and forced to waste a whole day somewhere in town. It is quite touching how my creature comforts are catered to in this house!"
And Kathleen began to laugh, ruefully. "You are just a great big baby, Felix. You are sulking and swelling up like a frog, because you think I don't appreciate what a wonderful husband I have and what a wonderful book he has written."
Then Kennaston began to laugh also. He knew that what she said was tolerably true, even to the batrachian simile. "When you insisted on adopting me, dear, you ought to have realized what you were letting yourself in for."
"- And I do think," Kathleen went on, evincing that conviction with which she as a rule repeated other people's remarks -"that you ought to make your next book something that deals with real life. Men Who Loved Alison is beautifully written and all that, but, exactly as the Tucson Pioneer said, it is really just colorful soapbubbly nonsense."
"Ah, but is it unadulterated nonsense, Kathleen, that somewhere living may be a uniformly noble transaction?" he debated -"and human passions never be in a poor way to find expression with adequate speech and action?" Pleased with the phrase, and feeling in a better temper, he began to butter a roll.
"I don't know about that; but, in any event, people prefer to read about the life they are familiar with."
"You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already. Yet I quite fail to see why, in books or elsewhere, any one should wish to be reminded of what human life is actually like. For living is the one art in which mankind has never achieved distinction. It is perhaps an obscure sense of this that makes us think the begetting of mankind an undiscussable subject, and death a sublime and edifying topic."
"Yes -? I dare say," Kathleen assented vaguely. "This herring is really very good, Felix. I think you would like it, if you just had not made up your mind to be stubborn about it -"Then she spoke with new animation: "Felix, Margaret Woods was in Louvet's yesterday morning, having her hair done for a dinner they gave the railroad crowd last night, and of all the faded washed-out looking people I ever saw -! And I can remember her having that hideous brown dress long before she was married. Of course, it doesn't make any difference to me that she didn't see fit to invite us. She was one of your friends, not mine. I was only thinking that, since she always pretended to be so fond of you, it does seem curious the way we are invariably left out."
So Kennaston did not embroider verbally his theme – of Living Adequately – as he had felt himself in vein to do could he have found a listener.
"Some day," he ruefully reflected, "I shall certainly write a paper upon The Lost Art of Conversing with One's Wife. Its appeal, I think, would be universal."
Then his eggs came…
VII
Peculiar Conduct of a Personage
SHORTLY afterward befell a queer incident. Kennaston, passing through a famed city, lunched with a personage who had been pleased to admire Men Who Loved Alison, and whose remunerative admiration had been skilfully trumpeted in the public press by Kennaston's publishers.
There were some ten others in the party, and Kennaston found it droll enough to be sitting at table with them. The lean pensive man – with hair falling over his forehead in a neatly-clipped "bang," such as custom restricts to children – had probably written that morning, in his official capacity, to innumerable potentates. That handsome bluff old navy-officer was a national hero: he would rank in history with Perry and John Paul Jones; yet here he sat, within arms'-reach, prosaically complaining of unseasonable weather. That bearded man, rubicund and monstrous as to nose, was perhaps the most powerful, as he was certainly the most wealthy, person inhabiting flesh; and it was rumored, in those Arcadian days, that kingdoms did not presume to go to war without securing the consent of this financier.
And that exquisitely neat fellow, looking like a lad unconvincingly made-up for an octogenarian in amateur theatricals, was the premier of the largest province in the world: his thin-featured neighbor was an aeronaut – at this period really a rara avis – and went above the clouds to get his livelihood, just as ordinary people went to banks and offices. And chief of all, their multifarious host – the personage, as one may discreetly call him – had left unattempted scarcely any rôle in the field of human activities: as ranchman, statesman, warrior, historian, editor, explorer, athlete, coiner of phrases, and re-discoverer of the Decalogue, impartially, he had labored to make the world a livelier place of residence; and already he was the pivot of as many legends as Charlemagne or Arthur.
The famous navy-officer, as has been said, was complaining of the weather. "The seasons have changed so, since I can remember. We seem to go straight from winter into summer nowadays."
"It has been rather unseasonable," assented the financier; "but then you always feel the heat so much more during the first few hot days."
"Besides," came the judicious comment, "it has not been the heat which was so oppressive this morning, I think, as the great amount of humidity in the air."
"Yes, it is most unpleasant – makes your clothes stick to you so."
"Ah, but don't you find, now," asked the premier gaily, "that looking at the thermometer tends to make you feel, really, much more uncomfortable than if you stayed uninformed as to precisely how hot it was?"
"Well! where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise, as I remember to have seen stated somewhere."