"Oh, you vivisecter," I broke in; "I'll have you to know, sir, that _my_ baby's pretty lispings are not to be treated like the rudimental language of a philologist's offspring! Put up that abominable book this instant! Did a cruel father, my lammie, spear his own child with a wicked pin, and stick her up in a case?" I _am_ a happy woman, Susie. Too happy; I'm frightened at it. You, may be, don't see where this comes in. If you don't, never mind. My heart _does_ run over nowadays for all sorts of reasons, and no-reasons. * * * * * Later on Ronayne told me, apropos of the Dialectical, that his objection was like the Frenchman's to the fox-hunt--"he'd been," if you please--went with Dr. Thunder and the Truth-Seeker just before our trip to Brighton. Then the subject under discussion was marriage, and Lady ----'s son read the paper--a long argument against monogamic marriage: In the light of experience and human reason it was monstrous to make the promises required at the altar; monogamic marriage fettered man, made his best capabilities impossible, made women hypocrites and slaves, made love commercial, was physiologically a cruelty and a mistake, and so on, and so on. "You don't love Lady ----'s son. You would love him less had you heard the things he found it possible to say before the fifty or sixty ladies who found it possible to listen to him, and to take some active part in the discussion that succeeded. "They called loudly upon Dr. Thunder to speak; but he refused to rise, preferring, I suppose, to hear how well his disciples could acquit themselves; for he is the author of a work upon physiology which is nick-named the 'Social Science Bible'--a book I believe to be one of the most mischievous that has appeared within recent years--materialistic to the last degree, degrading man, disorganizing society. "Over a glass of wine afterward, Mr. Feldwick--I beg your pardon, the Truth-Seeker--told me a pleasant little history of Lady ----'s son. He says the man had, as a child and youth, a thoroughly good nature, frank, placable, extraordinarily loving and generous, and that then he bade fair to achieve great things as a naturalist. "But Lady ----, who had had a hard experience of matrimony, with a husband whose only merit was his early death, lost, when this son was sixteen, her only other child, a boy of twelve--not an imbecile, but a slow, feeble-minded, gentle, and very beautiful child to whom mother and brother were passionately devoted.