“While sharing their troubles may we not lessen them. No man may live to himself; we’re wedded to each other.” “Yes, wedded to life. A royal phrase; since I’ve been constantly either hating or loving it; fearing to live and then fearing to die. Wedded! ah, ha, ha; the wedded are those who most madly love and then most bitterly hate.” “Say sometimes; then thou’lt be like the stopped horologue, telling the true time once in twenty-four hours, at least.” “Thy poetry runs into caustic quality. What hast thou been lunching on since morn?” “At least not on Dead Sea apples, fair without, ashes within. My poetry, if I have any, always sings in accord with the company it keeps.” “How many more arrows in thy quiver, hast thou?” “Only one, and that a question; does my master intend to foreswear marriage himself? He ridicules it.” “I have already done so.” “Well, ’tis well thou didst not live in Rome, for its citizens that dared to live amid the temptations and soul-crampings of voluntary bachelorhood were highly taxed for their disregard of the claims of society and the state.” “Yet even the Romans ever deemed bachelorhood a blessing. In this opinion royal Claudius decreed that the sailors who brought to Rome a ship loaded from the wheat granaries of Egypt in the time of Agabus’s famine, should be as a reward permitted to remain unmarried. If I were a Roman and a sailor I’d pray for a famine and a Claudius.” “A world without wives? What a world!” So saying Ichabod caught up a stick and began marking on the earth. “How now, Israel; some sorcery?” “No—yet, may be, yes. I’ll picture a world without women.” The Jew outlined the Egyptian deity, “_Kneph._” “What have we, man or beast?” “Truly, I think partly both. The knight has described his Elysium and I have here pictured a fit king for it. Behold thy god, sworn celibate. Egypt’s adored Kneph. Is this hideous enough?” “A god! well he’s not handsome; a ram’s head; four horns; two up, two down; armed as both ram and goat?” “Both were sacred to him in Egypt; also the horned snake with which Cleopatra put out her life; poor, unfortunate man-wrecked beauty.” “But, Jew, thou dost dawdle! What of this play?” “Oh, nothing, only Kneph would do well for a sailor, at Rome, under Claudius, in famine time!” “My poet wanders, but yet stings.” “So? Kneph was a god that boasted, or rather his spokesmen did, that he was the _father of his mother_. What economy! No need to be grateful to or love a mother; no need to wear a wife on the heart. The folly of a dark age by folly darkened in the mad attempt to lift up man without his purer better part.”