the household! But you don’t really mean it! First of all you have never seen the Ganges, and so you cannot know whether it is nice living there. Shall I just tell you how matters stand? It’s all lies, which you only tell for the one reason that in this whole versification you make yourself the slave of metre and rhyme. If the first line had ended in ham, scone, guava, there would have been no Ganges to flow swiftly, but you would have asked Mary whether she would have come with you to Schiedam, Toulon, Java, and so on. So you see that the proposed route of your journey was not meant seriously or sincerely, and that the whole affair resolves itself into a silly singsong of words without sense or object. What would happen, do you think, if Mary just took it into her head to want to make that mad journey? I am not even now speaking of the uncomfortable mode of travelling you suggest! But she is, thank Heaven, too sensible to long for a country about which you say:
Beneath the silent moon;
The lotus pensively listens:
Dear sister is coming soon!
The violets starward gazing,
Are lisping and laughing content,
The roses tell secrets amazing,
And fairy-tales sweet as their scent.
What would you want to do with Mary in that garden by moonlight, Stern? Is that moral, is it decent, is it respectable? Do you wish me to have to be ashamed of myself, like Busselinck & Waterman, with whom no self-respecting firm wants to have anything to do, because their daughter has run away, and because they are tricksters? What should I be compelled to answer, if they were to ask me on ’Change why my daughter stayed in that red garden such a long time? For surely you understand that no one would believe me if I said that she had to be there to pay a visit to the lotus-flowers, which, as you say, have already expected her a long time. And in the same way every sane person would laugh at me
