sedately dining with his wife,--neither of them eating with the zest
and vigor of their first youth, perhaps, but sharing amicably the more
moderate refreshment which middle-age requires,--without being at any
particular pains to conceal the fact from anybody. Here was then,
after all, the strong and sure salvation of Philistia, in this quiet,
unassuming common-sense, which dealt with the facts of life as facts,
the while that the foolish laws, and the academical and stercoricolous
nonsense of Philistia, reverberated as remotely and as unheeded as
harmless summer thunder.

"Sir," says elated Horvendile, "I perceive that you two have just been
eating, and that emboldens me to ask you--"

But at this point Horvendile found he had been knocked down, because
the parents of the representative citizen had taught him from his
earliest youth that any mention of eating was highly indecent in the
presence of gentlewomen. And for Horvendile, recumbent upon the
pavement, it was bewildering to note the glow of honest indignation in
the face of the representative citizen, who waited there, in front of
the restaurant he usually patronized....




COLOPHON


Here, rather vexatiously, the old manuscript breaks off. But what
survives and has been cited of this fragment amply shows you, I think,
that even in remote Philistia, whenever this question of "indecency"