So I asked him a riddle. “What is the difference between Kings Port and Newport?”
“Here you are all connected by marriage, and there they are all connected by divorce.”
“That’s true!” he cried, “that’s very true. I met the most embarrassingly cater-cornered families.”
“Oh, they weren’t embarrassed!” I interjected.
“And you told me you weren’t innocent!” I exclaimed. “They are going to institute a divorce march,” I continued. “‘Lohengrin’ or ‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ played backward. They have not settled which it is to be taught in the nursery with the other kindergarten melodies.”
He was still unsuspectingly diverted; and we walked along until we turned in the direction of my boarding-house.
“Did you ever notice,” I now said, “what a perpetual allegory ‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ contains?”
“I thought it was just a fairy sort of thing.”
“Yes, but when a great poet sets his hand to a fairy sort of thing, you get--well, you get poor Titania.”
“She fell in love with a jackass,” he remarked. “Puck bewitched her.”
“Precisely. A lovely woman with her arms around a jackass. Does that never happen in Kings Port?”
He began smiling to himself. “I’m afraid Puck isn’t all dead yet.”
I was now in a position to begin dropping my bitters. “Shakespeare was probably too gallant to put it the other way, and make Oberon fall in love with a female jackass. But what an allegory!”
I followed with another drop. “Titania got out of it. It is not always solved so easily.”
“No,” he muttered. “No.” It was quite evident that the flavor of my bitters reached him.
He was walking slowly, with his head down, and frowning hard. We had now come to the steps of my boarding-house, and I dropped my last drop. “But a disenchanted woman has the best of it--before marriage, at least.”
I evinced surprise. “Why, she can always break off honorably, and we never can, I suppose.”
For the third time this day he made me an astonishing rejoinder: “Would you like to take orders from a negro?”
It reduced me to stammering. “I have never--such a juncture has never--”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Even a Northerner!”
His face, as he said this, was a single glittering piece of fierceness. I was still so much taken aback that I said rather flatly: “But who has to?”