ded:

"If," said she to the bee, "if that man doesn't stop talking to me I'll
kick him. I'll stick a pin in him if he does not go out for a walk."

She grew desperately nervous. She was afraid that if she looked at him
any longer she would see him. To-morrow, she thought, I may notice
that he is a short, fat man in spectacles, and that will be the end of
everything. But the end of everything is also the beginning of
everything, and so she was one half in fear and the other half in hope.
A little more and she would hate him, and would begin the world again
with the same little hope and the same little despair for her meagre
capital.

She had already elaborated a theory that man was intended to work, and
that male sloth was offensive to Providence and should be forbidden by
the law. At times her tongue thrilled, silently as yet, to certain
dicta of the experienced Aunt who had superintended her youth, to the
intent that a lazy man is a nuisance to himself and to everybody else;
and, at last, she disguised this saying as an anecdote and repeated it
pleasantly to her husband.

He received it coldly, pondered it with disfavour, and dismissed it by
arguing that her Aunt had whiskers, that a whiskered female is a freak,
and that the intellectual exercises of a freak are---- He lifted his
eyebrows and his shoulders. He brushed her Aunt from the tips of his
fingers and blew her delicately beyond good manners and the mode.

But time began to hang heavily on both. The intellectual antics of a
leisured man become at last wearisome; his methods of thought, by mere
familiarity, grow distasteful; the time comes when all the arguments
are finished, there is nothing more to be said on any subject, and
boredom, without even the covering, apologetic hand, yawns and yawns
and cannot be appeased. Thereupon two cease to be company, and even a
serpent would be greeted as a cheery and timely visitor. Dismal
indeed, and not infrequent, is that time, and the vista therefrom is a
long, dull yawn stretching to the horizon and the grave. If at any
time we do revalue the values, let us write it down that the person who
makes us yawn is a criminal knave, and then we will abolish matrimony
and read Plato again.

The serpent arrived one morning hard on Mrs. Morrissy's pathetic
pressure. It had three large trunks, a toy terrier, and a volume of
verse. The trunks contained dresses, the dog insects, and the book
emotion--a sufficiently enlivening t