e
vulgar things. Everybody has one.

"Soul or no soul," I said, "you ought to invite Mrs. Ascher to your
party. Why not do the civil thing?"

"I'll do the civil thing some other time. I'll take her to a concert,
but I don't want her to-night."

"Perhaps," I said, "your brother's circus is a little--shall we say
Parisian? I don't think you need mind that. Mrs. Ascher isn't exactly a
girl. It would take a lot to shock her. In fact, Gorman, my experience
of these women with artistic souls is that the riskier the thing is the
better they like it."

That is, as I have noticed, one of the great differences between a
commonplace, so to speak, religious soul and a soul of the artistic
kind. You save the one by keeping it as clean as you can. The other
seems to thrive best when heavily manured. It is no disparagement of the
artistic soul to say that it likes manure. Some of the most delicious
and beautiful things in the world are like that, raspberries for
instance, which make excellent jam, roses about which poets write, and
begonias. I knew a man once who poured bedroom slops into his begonia
bed every day and he had the finest flowers I ever saw.

"Gorman," I said, "did it ever occur to you that Mrs. Ascher's soul is
like a begonia?"

"Bother Mrs. Ascher's soul!" said Gorman. "I'm not thinking about it.
The circus is a show you might take a nun to. Nobody could possibly
object to it. The reason I headed her off was because I wanted to talk
business to Ascher, very particular business and rather important. In
fact," here he sank his voice to a confidential whisper, "I want you to
help me to rope him in."

"If you've succeeded in roping him into a circus," I said, "I should
think you could rope him into anything else without my help. Would you
mind telling me what the scheme is?"

"I'm trying to," he said, "but you keep interrupting me with silly
riddles about begonias."

"I'm sorry I mentioned begonias. All the same it's a pity you wouldn't
listen. You'd have liked the part about manure. But never mind. Go on
about Ascher."

"My brother Tim," said Gorman, "has invented a new cash register. He's
always inventing things; been at it ever since he was a boy. But they're
mostly quite useless things though as cute as the devil. In fact I don't
think he ever hit on anything the least bit of good till he got this
cash register."

"Before we go further," I said, "what is a cash register?"

"It's a machine used in shops