Dick: Well, natural selection?
Maury: Wrong.
Dick: I give it up.
Maury: Ontogony recapitulates phyllogony.
Fifth Young Man: Take your base!
Maury: Ask you another. What's the influence of mice on the clover crop? (Laughter.)
Fourth Young Man: What's the influence of rats on the Decalogue?
Maury: Shut up, you saphead. There is a connection.
Dick: What is it then?
Maury: (Pausing a moment in growing disconcertion) Why, let's see. I seem to have forgotten exactly. Something about the bees eating the clover.
Fourth Young Man: And the clover eating the mice! Haw! Haw!
Maury: (Frowning) Let me just think a minute.
Dick: (Sitting up suddenly) Listen!
(A volley of chatter explodes in the adjoining room. The six young men arise, feeling at their neckties.)
Dick: (Weightily) We'd better join the firing squad. They're going to take the picture, I guess. No, that's afterward.
Otis: Cable, you take the ragtime bridesmaid.
Fourth Young Man: I wish to God I'd sent that present.
Maury: If you'll give me another minute I'll think of that about the mice.
Otis: I was usher last month for old Charlie McIntyre and——
(They move slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans from Adam Patch's organ.)
