Jewel Weed

"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.