“Jack, be quiet,” cried Mrs. Beeby to her husband. “Can’t you see I’ve got an idea !” She was sketching rapidly and intently the first rough outlines of a drawing. All Mrs. Beeby’s drawings were exquisite.

The Professor sniggered.

“You never had an idea in your life, my sweet,” he said. “Given an idea, you wouldn’t be a woman—much less the adorable woman that I love.”

The Professor was wrong, as professors frequently are. But the excitement of a brilliant course of lectures in metaphysics was still upon him, and he was unconsciously soothing himself by making playful (and erroneous) application of things he had read and thought and spoken about of late, copiously and in the orthodox abstract professorial way.

He said much more, and his wife, for all her industrious drawing, contradicted him cleverly. Yet their pretty war of words is of no more concern to us here than the prettier truce of hearts of which it was a graceful camouflage. For this, good reader, by your leave, is not a love story. It is a solemn attempt to discuss, in a practical and homely way, some of the very big things professors expound grandiloquently and in moods not always consonant with common sense.