"There!" I said to Kendricks. "Do you think the general public
would?"

"Miss Gage isn't the general public," said my wife, who had followed
the course of my thought; her tone implied that Miss Gage was wiser
and better.

"Would you allow yourself to be drawn," I asked, "dreamily issuing
from an aisle of the pine grove as the tutelary goddess of a
Pompeian cottage?"

The girl cast a bewildered glance at my wife, who said, "You needn't
pay any attention to him, Miss Gage. He has an idea that he is
making a joke."

We felt that we had done enough for one afternoon, when we had done
the House of Pansa, and I proposed that we should go and sit down in
Congress Park and listen to the Troy band. I was not without the
hope that it would play "Washington Post."

My wife contrived that we should fall in behind the young people as
we went, and she asked, "What DO you suppose she made of it all?"

"Probably she thought it was the house of Sancho Panza."

"No; she hasn't read enough to be so ignorant even as that. It's
astonishing how much she doesn't know. What can her home life have
been like?"

"Philistine to the last degree. We people who are near to