need to play double solitaire
in order to fill in the time between supper and seeing is the pantry
window locked in case Mrs. Wilson is nervous that way. Then again there
is things happening in this country which looked very picayune to Mr.
Wilson over in France, and which will seem so big when he arrives here
that almost as soon as he sets his foot on the dock in Hoboken, the
League of Nations will get marked off in his mind for depreciation as
much as a new automobile does by merely having the owner's number plates
attached to it, even if it ain't been run two miles from the agency
yet."

"I never thought of it that way," Morris admitted, "but it is a fact
just the same that this here League of Nations is only being operated at
the present time under a demonstrator's license, so to speak, and as
soon as it gets its regular number, the manufacturers and the agents
won't be so sensitive about the knocks that the prospective customers is
handing it."

"And just so soon as the demonstrations have gone far enough, Mawruss,
just you watch all the nations of the earth that ain't made up their
minds whether they want to ride or not, jump aboard," Abe said. "Also,
Mawruss, this League of Nations is to the United States Senate what a
new-car proposition is to the head of any respectable family. If the
wife wants it and the children wants it, it may be that the old man will
think it over for a couple of weeks, and he may begin by saying that
the family would get a new car over his dead body, and what do they
think he is made of, money? y'understand, but sooner or later he is
going to sign up for that new car, and don't you forget it. And after
all, Mawruss, if the other big nations is in on this League of Nations,
we could certainly afford to pay our share of what it costs to run it."

"Maybe we could," Morris concluded, "but if a new League of Nations is
like a new automobile, we are probably in for an expensive time, because
with a new car, Abe, it ain't what you run that costs so much money.
It's what you back into."

XXIII

THE RECENT UNPLEASANTNESS IN TOLEDO, OHIO

"If we would only had our wits about us the day we sent for the
policeman to put out that feller we had running the elevator, Mawruss,
we could of made quite a lot of money maybe," Abe Potash remarked to
Morris Perlmutter a few days after the heavy-weight title changed hands.

"If we would only had our wits about us and you had taken my advice to