The Hohenzollerns in America<br />With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and Other Impossibilities, Stephen Leacock [crime books to read txt] 📗

trying to invest myself with an air of further interest, when another man was introduced to her, quite evidently, from his appearance, a vapid jackass without one tenth of the brain calibre that I have.

"Oh, how do you do?" he said. "I say, I've just heard that Harvard beat Princeton this afternoon. Great, isn't it?"

In two minutes they were talking like old friends. How do these silly asses do it?

When Dressed Hogs are Dull

An equally unsuccessful type of conversation, often overheard at receptions, is where one of the two parties to it is too surly, too stupid, or too self-important and too rich to talk, and the other labours in vain.

The surly one is, let us say, a middle-aged, thick-set man of the type that anybody recognizes under the name Money Hog. This kind of person, as viewed standing in his dress suit, mannerless and stupid, too rich to have to talk and too dull to know how to, always recalls to my mind the head-line of the market reports in the newspapers, "Dressed Hogs are Dull."

The other party to the conversation is a winsome and agreeable woman, trying her best to do her social duty.

But, tenez, as the Comtesse of Z—— would say, I can exactly illustrate the position and attitude of the two of them from a recollection of my childhood. I remember that in one of my nursery books of forty years ago there was a picture entitled "The Lady in Love With A Swine." A willowy lady in a shimmering gown leaned over the rail of a tessellated pig-sty, in which an impossibly clean hog stood in an attitude of ill-mannered immobility. With the picture was the rhyming legend,

There was a Lady in love with a swine, "Honey," said she, "will you be mine? I'll build you a silver sty And in it you shall lie." "Honk!" said He.

There was something, as I recall it, in the sweet willingness of the Lady that was singularly appealing, and contrasted with the dull mannerless passivity of the swine.

In each of the little stanzas that followed, the pretty advances of the Lady were rebuffed by a surly and monosyllabic "honk" from the hog.

Here is the social counterpart of the scene in the picture-book. Mr. Grunt, capitalist, is standing in his tessellated sty,—the tessellated sty being represented by the hardwood floor of a fashionable drawing-room. His face is just the same as the face of the pig in the picture-book. The willowy lady, in the same shimmering clothes and with the same pretty expression of eagerness, is beside him.

"Oh, Mr. Grunt," she is saying, "how interesting it must be to be in your place and feel such tremendous power. Our hostess was just telling me that you own practically all the shoemaking machinery factories—it IS shoe-making machinery, isn't it?—east of Pennsylvania."

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt.

"Shoe-making machinery," goes on the willowy lady (she really knows nothing and cares less about it) "must be absolutely fascinating, is it not?"

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt.

"But still you must find it sometimes a dreadful strain, do you not? I mean, so much brain work, and that sort of thing."

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt.

"I should love so much to see one of your factories. They must be so interesting."

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt. Then he turns and moves away sideways. Into his little piggy eyes has come a fear that the lady is going to ask him to subscribe to something, or wants a block of his common stock, or his name on a board of directors. So he leaves her. Yet if he had known it she is probably as rich as he is, or richer, and hasn't the faintest interest in his factories, and never intends to go near one. Only she is fit to move and converse in polite society and Mr. Grunt is not.