ightened at it. You, may
be, don't see where this comes in. If you don't, never mind. My heart
_does_ run over nowadays for all sorts of reasons, and no-reasons.

* * * * *

Later on Ronayne told me, apropos of the Dialectical, that his
objection was like the Frenchman's to the fox-hunt--"he'd been," if you
please--went with Dr. Thunder and the Truth-Seeker just before our trip
to Brighton. Then the subject under discussion was marriage, and Lady
----'s son read the paper--a long argument against monogamic marriage:
In the light of experience and human reason it was monstrous to make
the promises required at the altar; monogamic marriage fettered man,
made his best capabilities impossible, made women hypocrites and
slaves, made love commercial, was physiologically a cruelty and a
mistake, and so on, and so on. "You don't love Lady ----'s son. You
would love him less had you heard the things he found it possible to
say before the fifty or sixty ladies who found it possible to listen to
him, and to take some active part in the discussion that succeeded.

"They called loudly upon Dr. Thunder to speak; but he refused to rise,
preferring, I suppose, to hear how well his disciples could acquit
themselves; for he is the author of a work upon physiology which is
nick-named the 'Social Science Bible'--a book I believe to be one of
the most mischievous that has appeared within recent years--materialistic
to the last degree, degrading man, disorganizing society.

"Over a glass of wine afterward, Mr. Feldwick--I beg your pardon, the
Truth-Seeker--told me a pleasant little history of Lady ----'s son. He
says the man had, as a child and youth, a thoroughly good nature,
frank, placable, extraordinarily loving and generous, and that then he
bade fair to achieve great things as a naturalist.

"But Lady ----, who had had a hard experience of matrimony, with a
husband whose only merit was his early death, lost, when this son was
sixteen, her only other child, a boy of twelve--not an imbecile, but a
slow, feeble-minded, gentle, and very beautiful child to whom mother
and brother were passionately devoted.

"Lady ---- was nearly frantic at this loss: would see no one; retired
for a year or so to a desolate Scotch place they have, and then
suddenly went abroad. There she flew restlessly from Algeria to St.
Petersburg and Norway for awhile, seen everywhere, but nowhere long;
then followed several