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"Really, Mr. Pedagog," returned the Idiot, with an irritating shake of his head, as if he were confidentially hinting to the School-Master to keep quiet "really you pain me by these futile denials. Nobody forced you into the confession. You made it entirely of your own volition. Now I ask you, as a man and brother, what's the use of saying anything more about it?
"I wish I were beginning life all over again," said the Idiot one spring morning, as he took his accustomed place at Mrs. Pedagog's table. "I wish you were," said Mr. Pedagog from behind his newspaper.
"He is full of pretence and hollowness, but he is sometimes almost brilliant." "What you say is very true," said Mr. Whitechoker. "I think he has just escaped being a smart man. I wish we could take him in hand, Mr. Pedagog, and make him more of a fellow than he is." Later in the day the Poet met the Idiot on the stairs.
Pedagog, coldly. "Take it to him." "Empty, ma'am?" asked the maid. "Certainly, Mary," said the Idiot, perceiving Mrs. Pedagog's point. "I asked for another cup, not for more coffee." Mrs. Pedagog smiled quietly at her own joke. At hair-splitting she could give the Idiot points. "I am surprised that Mary should have thought I wanted more coffee," continued the Idiot, in an aggrieved tone.
"Is it to be a magazine, or a comic paper, or what?" asked the Bibliomaniac. "Neither. It's a daily." "That's nonsense," said Mr. Pedagog, putting his spoon into the condensed-milk can by mistake. "There isn't a single scheme in daily journalism that hasn't been tried except printing an evening paper in the morning." "That's been tried," said the Idiot.
He tapped the earth for natural gas; he bored in and he bored out, and he bored nature to death, and then nature rose up and smote him and his cities and his oyster-beds, and she'll do it again unless we go slow." "There is a great deal in what you say," said Mr. Whitechoker. "Very true," said Mrs. Pedagog. "But I wish he'd stop saying it.
"Don't pay any attention to him, my dear," said the School-Master to the landlady, whose ire was so very much aroused that she was about to make known her sentiments on certain subjects. "No, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot, "don't pay any attention to me, I beg of you. Anything that could add to the jealousy of Mr. Pedagog would redound to the discomfort of all of us.
"You'll live," put in Mr. Pedagog, with a chuckle. "The good die young." "How did you happen to keep alive all this time then, Mr. Pedagog?" asked the Idiot. "I have always eschewed tobacco in every form, for one thing," said Mr. Pedagog. "I am surprised," put in the Idiot. "That's really a bad habit, and I marvel greatly that you should have done it."
Pedagog, who had come into the dining-room in a slightly irritable frame of mind, induced perhaps by Mrs. Pedagog's insistence that as he was now part proprietor of the house he should be a little more prompt in making his contributions towards its maintenance, chose to take the remark as implying a reflection upon the way things were managed in the household. "Humph!" he said.
"Don't be too pleased, Mr. Pedagog," said the Idiot, dryly. "I only wanted to show Mr. Warren that you and Mr. Whitechoker, mines of information though you are, have not as yet worked up a corner on knowledge to the exclusion of the rest of us." And with these words the Idiot left the table. "He is a queer fellow," said the School-Master.
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