“The children!” cried John Mayrant.  “Why, it’s for their sake deserted women abstain from divorce!”

“Juliet would see deeper than such mothers.  She could not have her little sons and daughters grow up and comprehend their father’s absences, and see their mother’s submission to his returns for such discovery would scorch the marrow of any hearts they had.”

At this, as we came out of the Library, he made an astonishing rejoinder, and one which I cannot in the least account for:  “South Carolina does not allow divorce.”

“Then I should think,” I said to him, “that all you people here would be doubly careful as to what manner of husbands and wives you chose for yourselves.”

Such a remark was sailing, you may say, almost within three points of the wind; and his own accidental allusion to Romeo had brought it about with an aptness and a celerity which were better for my purpose than anything I had privately developed from the text of Bottom and Titania; none the less, however, did I intend to press into my service that fond couple also as basis for a moral, in spite of the sharp turn which those last words of mine now caused him at once to give to our conversation.  His quick reversion to the beginning of the talk seemed like a dodging of remarks that hit too near home for him to relish hearing pursued.

“Well, sir,” he resumed with the same initial briskness, “I was ashamed if you were not.”

“I still don’t make out what impropriety we have jointly committed.”

“What do you think of the views you expressed about our country?”

“Oh!  When we sat on the gravestones.”

“What do you think about it to-day?”

I turned to him as we slowly walked toward Worship Street.  “Did you say anything then that you would take back now?”

He pondered, wrinkling his forehead.  “Well, but all the same, didn’t we give the present hour a pretty black eye?”

“The present hour deserves a black eye, and two of them!”

He surveyed me squarely.  “I believe you’re a pessimist!”

“That is the first trashy thing I’ve heard you say.”

“Thank you!  At least admit you’re scarcely an optimist.”

“Optimist!  Pessimist!  Why, you’re talking just like a newspaper!”

He laughed.  “Oh, don’t compare a gentleman to a newspaper.”

“Then keep your vocabulary clean of bargain-counter words.  A while ago the journalists had a furious run upon the adjective ‘un-American.’  Anybody or anything that displeased them was ‘un-American.’  They ran it into the ground, and in its place they have lately set up ‘pessimist,’ which certainly has a threatening appearance.  They don’t know its meaning, and in their mouths it merely signifies that what a man says snakes them feel personally uncomfortable.  The word has become a dusty rag of slang.  The arrested burglar very likely calls the policeman a pessimist; and, speaking reverently and with no intention to shock you, the scribes and Pharisees would undoubtedly have called Christ a pessimist when He called them hypocrites, had they been acquainted with the word.”