Part 7 (2/2)

”Oh, I beg your pardon,” said the Altrurian. ”I didn't dream of accusing you of such inhumanity. But, you see, our whole system is so very different that, as I said, it is hard for me to conceive of yours, and I am very curious to understand its workings. If you shot your fellow-man, as you say, the law would punish you; but if, for some reason that you decided to be good, you took away his means of living, and he actually starved to death--”

”Then the law would have nothing to do with it,” the professor replied for the manufacturer, who did not seem ready to answer. ”But that is not the way things fall out. The man would be supported in idleness, probably, till he got another job, by his union, which would take the matter up.”

”But I thought that our friend did not employ union labor,” returned the Altrurian.

I found all this very uncomfortable, and tried to turn the talk back to a point that I felt curious about: ”But in Altruria, if the literary cla.s.s is not exempt from the rule of manual labor, where do they find time and strength to write?”

”Why, you must realize that our manual labor is never engrossing or exhausting. It is no more than is necessary to keep the body in health. I do not see how you remain well here, you people of sedentary occupations.”

”Oh, we all take some sort of exercise. We walk several hours a day, or we row, or we ride a bicycle, or a horse, or we fence.”

”But to us,” returned the Altrurian, with a growing frankness which nothing but the sweetness of his manner would have excused, ”exercise for exercise would appear stupid. The barren expenditure of force that began and ended in itself, and produced nothing, we should--if you will excuse my saying so--look upon as childish, if not insane or immoral.”

V

At this moment the lady who had hailed me so gayly from the top of the coach while I stood waiting for the Altrurian to help the porter with the baggage, just after the arrival of the train, came up with her husband to our little group and said to me: ”I want to introduce my husband to you.

He adores your books.” She went on much longer to this effect, while the other men grinned round and her husband tried to look as if it were all true, and her eyes wandered to the Altrurian, who listened gravely. I knew perfectly well that she was using her husband's zeal for my fiction to make me present my friend; but I did not mind that, and I introduced him to both of them. She took possession of him at once and began walking him off down the piazza, while her husband remained with me, and the members of our late conference drifted apart. I was not sorry to have it broken up for the present; it seemed to me that it had lasted quite long enough, and I lighted a cigar with the husband, and we strolled together in the direction his wife had taken.

He began, apparently in compliment to literature in my person: ”Yes, I like to have a book where I can get at it when we're not going out to the theatre, and I want to quiet my mind down after business. I don't care much what the book is; my wife reads to me till I drop off, and then she finishes the book herself and tells me the rest of the story. You see, business takes it out of you so! Well, I let my wife do most of the reading, anyway. She knows pretty much everything that's going in that line. We haven't got any children, and it occupies her mind. She's up to all sorts of things--she's artistic, and she's musical, and she's dramatic, and she's literary. Well, I like to have her. Women are funny, anyway.”

He was a good-looking, good-natured, average American of the money-making type; I believe he was some sort of a broker, but I do not quite know what his business was. As we walked up and down the piazza, keeping a discreet little distance from the corner where his wife had run off to with her capture, he said he wished he could get more time with her in the summer--but he supposed I knew what business was. He was glad she could have the rest, anyway; she needed it.

”By-the-way,” he asked, ”who is this friend of yours? The women are all crazy about him, and it's been an even thing between my wife and Miss Groundsel which would fetch him first. But I'll bet on my wife every time, when it comes to a thing like that. He's a good-looking fellow--some kind of foreigner, I believe; pretty eccentric, too, I guess. Where is Altruria, anyway?”

I told him, and he said: ”Oh yes. Well, if we are going to restrict immigration, I suppose we sha'n't see many more Altrurians, and we'd better make the most of this one. Heigh?”

I do not know why this innocent pleasantry piqued me to say: ”If I understand the Altrurians, my dear fellow, nothing could induce them to emigrate to America. As far as I can make out, they would regard it very much as we should regard settling among the Eskimos.”

”Is that so?” asked my new acquaintance, with perfect good temper. ”Why?”

”Really, I can't say, and I don't know that I've explicit authority for my statement.”

”They are worse than the English used to be,” he went on. ”I didn't know that there were any foreigners who looked at us in that light now. I thought the war settled all that.”

I sighed. ”There are a good many things that the war didn't settle so definitely as we've been used to thinking, I'm afraid. But, for that matter, I fancy an Altrurian would regard the English as a little lower in the scale of savagery than ourselves even.”

”Is that so? Well, that's pretty good on the English, anyway,” said my companion, and he laughed with an easy satisfaction that I envied him.

”My dear!” his wife called to him from where she was sitting with the Altrurian, ”I wish you would go for my shawl. I begin to feel the air a little.”

”I'll go if you'll tell me where,” he said, and he confided to me, ”Never knows where her shawl is one-quarter of the time.”

”Well, I think I left it in the office somewhere. You might ask at the desk; or perhaps it's in the rack by the dining-room door--or maybe up in our room.”

”I thought so,” said her husband, with another glance at me, as if it were the greatest fun in the world, and he started amiably off.

I went and took a chair by the lady and the Altrurian, and she began at once: ”Oh, I'm so glad you've come! I have been trying to enlighten Mr.

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