"No, indeed," she replied. "I'd fall back on golf if Polly mentioned _Sordello_ to me. You may remember that you sent it to me when we were engaged, and I loved you so much--then--that I read it. If I hadn't loved you I couldn't have done it."
"Well," smiled the Idiot, "what did you think of it?"
"I think Browning had a good lie, but he foozled," said Mrs. Idiot, with her eyes atwinkle, and the Idiot subsided for at least ten seconds.
"I wish you'd say that to Polly some time," he observed. "It's so very true, and put with an originality which cannot but appeal to the most hardened of literary women."
"I will if I ever get the chance," said Mrs. Idiot.
"Suppose we make the chance?" suggested the Idiot. "Let's go down there and call to-night. I'll work the conversation up so that you can get that off as an impromptu."
"No," said Mrs. Idiot. "I don't think we'd better. In the first place, Mrs. Whalker told me yesterday that Polly is to read a paper on Balzac before the S. F. M. E. to-morrow evening, and on Friday morning she is to discuss the 'Influence of Mozart on De Koven' before the Musical Mothers' Meeting, and on Saturday afternoon she is going to have an anthropological tea at her house, which she is to open with some speculations as to whether in the Glacial Period dudes were addicted to the use of cigarettes."
"Great Scott!" said the Idiot. "This is her busy week."
"Tolerably so," said Mrs. Idiot. "She has probably reserved this evening to read up on Balzac for to-morrow's essay, so I think, my dear, we'd better not go."
"Right as usual," said the Idiot. And then he added, "Poor Dawkins, who is taking care of him now?"
"I think," said Mrs. Idiot, "that possibly Mrs. Dawkins has sublet the contract for looking after her husband and children to the United States Housekeeping Company Limited."
The Idiot gazed blankly at his wife, and awaited an explanation.
[Illustration: "'THE BABY IS ROCKED TO SLEEP EVERY NIGHT'"]
"An organization, my dear," she continued, "formed by a number of well-meaning and remorseful widows who, having lost their husbands, begin to appreciate their virtues, and who, finding themselves sympathetic when it is too late, are devoting themselves to the husbands of others who are neglected. A subscription of five hundred dollars will secure the supervision of all the domestic arrangements of a home--marketing, engagement and discharge of domestics, house-cleaning, buttons sewed on, darning done, care of flowers, wifely duties generally; for one thousand dollars they will bring up the children, and see that the baby is rocked to sleep every night, and suitably interested in elevating narratives and poems like Joseph's coat of many colors, and Tom, Tom the Piper's Son. This enables an advanced woman like Mrs. Dawkins to devote her mornings to the encyclopedias, her afternoons to the public libraries, and her evenings to the functions whereat she may read the papers which her devotion to the encyclopedias and the libraries has brought forth."