Adventures in Contentment

"What on earth are you laughing about?" cries Harriet from the sitting-room. When I have caught my breath, I say, holding up my book: "This absurd man here is telling of the adventures of a certain chivalrous Knight." "But I can't see how you can laugh out like that, sitting all alone there. Why, it's uncanny." "You don't know the Knight, Harriet, nor his squire Sancho." "You talk of them just as though they were real persons." "Real!" I exclaim, "real! Why they are much more real than most of the people we know. Horace is a mere wraith compared with Sancho." And then I rush out. "Let me read you this," I say, and I read that matchless chapter wherein the Knight, having clapped on his head the helmet which Sancho has inadvertently used as a receptacle for a dinner of curds and, sweating whey profusely, goes forth to fight two fierce lions. As I proceed with that prodigious story, I can see Harriet gradually forgetting her sewing, and I read on the more furiously until, coming to the point of the conflict wherein the generous and gentle lion, having yawned, "threw out some half yard of tongue wherewith he licked and washed his face," Harriet begins to laugh. "There!" I say triumphantly. Harriet looks at me accusingly. "Such foolishness!" she says. "Why should any man in his senses try to fight caged lions!" "Harriet," I say, "you are incorrigible." She does not deign to reply, so I return with meekness to my room.