"Miss Wiggins--or Mrs. Saphead, to be more precise," said Mr. Brief, "is only one instance."
"Well--there was Margaret Perkins--same town--same experience," said the Idiot. "Lovely girl--sought after by everybody--proposed to her myself five times--President of the Mental Culture Society of Baggville--graduate of Smythe--woman-member of Board of Education--Director of Young Girls' Institute--danced like a dream--had a sense of humor--laughed at my jokes--and married--what?"
"Prof. Omega Nit Zero, teacher of Cingalese in the University of Oklawaha, founded by a millionaire from Geneseo, New Jersey, who owned a hotel on the Oklawaha River that didn't pay, and hoped to brace up a bad investment by the establishment in the vicinity of a centre of culture. Prof. Zero receives ten dollars a week, and with his wife and three pupils constitutes the whole faculty, board of trustees, janitor, and student body of the University," said the Idiot. "Mrs. Zero dresses on nothing a year; cares for her five children on the same basis, and is happy. They are the principal patrons of the Oklawaha Hotel."
"Well--if she is happy?" said the Bibliomaniac. "What business is it of anybody else? I think if Prof. Zero makes her happy he's the right kind of a man."
"You couldn't make Zero the right kind of a man," said the Idiot. "He isn't built that way. He wears men's clothes and he has sweet manners, and a dulcet voice, and the learning of the serpent; but when it comes to manhood he has the initiative of the turtle, lacking the cash value of the terrapin, or the turtle's mock brother; he wears a beard, but it is the beard of the bearded lady who up-to-date appears to be a useless appanage of the strenuous life; and when you try to get at his Americanism, if he has any, he flies off into stilted periods having to do with the superior virtues of the Cingalese. And Margaret Perkins that was hangs on his utterances as though he were a very archangel."
"Good," ejaculated Mr. Brief. "I am glad to hear that she is happy."
"So am I," said the Idiot. "But such happiness."
"Well, what's it all got to do with Leap Year, anyhow?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"Nothing at all, except that it proves that girls aren't fitted really to choose their own husbands, and that therefore the special privilege conferred upon them by the recurrence of Leap Year should be rescinded by law," said the Idiot. "That privilege, owing to woman's incapacity to choose correctly, and man's weakness in the use of negatives, is a standing menace to the future happiness of the people."