consuming at a Gargantuan rate, and
as he ate he smiled to himself.

"Well, Mr. Ogre," said the doctor, sitting down beside him with a gasp
of relief; "let a wave-worn mariner into your den, will you?"

Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery's smile broke into an open laugh.
He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next rooms: "A boiler
factory ain't in it with woman, lovely woman, is it?" he put it to his
old friend.

"Gracious powers! There's nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!" the
doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery. "I don't know which
makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here
and find you thinking they're _funny_!"

"They _are_ funny!" insisted the Judge tranquilly. "I stood by the door
and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch, till I thought I
should have a fit. I never heard anything funnier on the stage."

"Look-y here, Nat," the doctor stared up at him angrily, "they're not
monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on holidays and then laughed at!
They're the other half of a whole that we're half of, and don't you
forget it! Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do
this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to
pay for it? You'd lock up a _man_ as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his
life so. What they're like, and what they do with their time and
strength concerns us enough sight more than what the tariff is, let me
tell you!"

"I admit that what your wife is like concerns you a whole lot!" The
Judge laughed good-naturedly in the face of the little old bachelor.
"Don't commence jumping on the American woman now! I won't stand it!
She's the noblest of her sex!"

"Do you know why I am bald?" said Dr. Melton, rubbing his hand over his
shining dome.

"If I did, I wouldn't admit it," the Judge put up a cautious guard,
"because I foresee that whatever I say will be used as evidence against
me."

"I've torn out all my hair in desperation at hearing such men as you
claim to admire and respect and wish to advance the American woman. You
don't give enough thought to her--real thought--from one year's end to
another to know whether you think she has an immortal soul or not!"

"Oh, you can't get anywhere, trying to reason about those sort of
things. You have to take souls for granted. Besides, I give her as fair
a deal in that respect as I give myself," protested Lydia's father
reasonably, smiling and eating.