CHANTECLER
Your humour?  Your dogma, suspicion is!  Call it your dogma!

PATOU
You can stoop to a pun?  From bad to worse!  I’m enough of a psychologist
to feel the evil spreading, and I’ve the scent of a rat-terrier.

CHANTECLER
But you are no rat-terrier!

PATOU
[Shaking his head.] Chantecler, how do we know?

CHANTECLER [Considering him.] Your appearance is in fact peculiar What actually is your breed?

PATOU I am a horrible mixture, issue of every passer-by!  I can feel barking within me the voice of every blood.  Retriever, mastiff, pointer, poodle, hound—­my soul is a whole pack, sitting in circle, musing.  Cock, I am all dogs, I have been every dog!

CHANTECLER
Then what a sum of goodness must be stored in you!

PATOU Brother, we are framed to understand each other.  You sing to the sun and scratch up the earth.  I, when I wish to do myself a good and a pleasure—­

CHANTECLER
You lie on the earth and sleep in the sun!

PATOU
[With a pleased yap.] Aye!

CHANTECLER
We have ever had in common our love for those two things.

PATOU
I am so fond of the sun that I howl at the moon.  And so fond of the
earth that I dig great holes and shove my nose in it!

CHANTECLER
I know!  The gardener’s wife has her opinion of those holes.—­But what
are the dangers you discern?  All lies quiet beneath the quiet sky. 
Nothing appears to be threatening my humble sunlit dominions.

THE OLD HEN [Lifting the basket-lid with her head.] The egg looks like marble until it gets smashed! [The lid drops.]

CHANTECLER
[To PATOU.] What dangers, friend?

PATOU
There are two.  First, in yonder cage—­

CHANTECLER
Well?

PATOU
That satirical whistling.

CHANTECLER
What about it?

PATOU
Pernicious.

CHANTECLER
In what way?

PATOU
In every way!

CHANTECLER [Ironical.] Bad as all that, is it? [The PEACOCK’S squall is heard in the distance:  “Ee—­yong!"]

PATOU
And then that cry, the Peacock’s!

[The PEACOCK, further off:  “Ee—­yong!"]

PATOU
More out of tune all by itself than a whole village singing society!

CHANTECLER
Come, what have they done to you, that whistler and that posturer?

PATOU [Grumbling.] They have done to me—­that I know not what they may do to you!  They have done to me—­that among us simple, kindly folk they have introduced new fashions, the Blackbird of being funny, the Peacock of putting on airs!  Fashions which the latter in his grotesque bad taste picked up parading on the marble terraces of the vulgar rich, and the former—­Heaven knows where! along with his cynicism and his slang.  Now the