ONE:At one side of the kitchen there was a long table, where the food was[Pg 171] prepared previous to its introduction to the cooking-pot, and near this table there was a series of shelves where the plates, cups, saucers, and other articles of the dinner-service were kept. The kitchen could be shut off at night, like the other rooms, by means of paper screens, and it was here that the cook and her assistants slept when the labors of the day were over. The bedding, what little there was of it, was brought from a cupboard in one side of the room, and was altogether out of sight in the day. When not wanted, it was speedily put away, and a few minutes sufficed to convert the kitchen into a sleeping-room, or the sleeping-room into a kitchen."Yes, you might, easily," said Charlotte; "for I only mean shortcomings of the kind we readily excuse in others though we never can or should pardon them in ourselves."
TWO:"I see the man," he began, timidly, "I see 'im as I was going along the path to Bapchurch.""I said next week," explained the other, "in order to make my meaning clear. Actually, of course, I don't describe time in such arbitrary terms. But when one is in Rome, you know. What I mean to convey is that I am capable of going not only somewhere, but also somewhen."
ONE:"Precisely. And because you have seen[Pg 179] more than I have you are less able to understand the matter than I am. You cannot see the wood for the trees. Again, you were frightened out of your life. Your scientific instincts were stampeded. You saw only a hideous malformation, a neural freak, a preposterous human machine. It was inconceivable that you should have been able to think clearly under the circumstances. Consider the matter in the sober aftermath of reason, and you must agree with me that it is really not more extraordinary that a man should function by mechanical means than that he should function at all."
TWO:"There are the funniest cats in this country that you ever saw. They have the shortest kind of tails, and a good many of them haven't any tails at all any more than a rabbit. You know we expect every kitten in America to play with her tail, and what can she do when she has no tail to play with? I think that must be the reason why the Japanese cats are so solemn, and why they won't play as our cats do. I have tried to find out how it all happens, but nobody can tell. Doctor Bronson says the kittens are born without tails, and that is all he knows about it. I think they must be a different kind of cat from ours; but, apart from the absence of tails, they don't look any way dissimilar. Somebody says that an American once took one of these tailless cats to San Francisco as a curiosity, and that it would never make friends with any long-tailed cat. It would spit and scratch, and try to bite off the other cat's tail; but one day, when they put it with a cat whose tail had been cut off by a bad boy, it was friendly at once."
