“Just what is your Perpetual Motion Food?” inquired Bathybius of the chemist.

“I can’t reveal that, of course, except that it has a strychnine and alcohol base,” replied Elson.

“Strychnine in sizeable doses is a stimulant, as is well known; but alcohol? For training racers? You’re pulling my leg; I’m not prepared to accept your theories,” exclaimed the doctor.

‘We’re straying from the heart of the matter,” commented Mrs. Gough.

“Gentlemen, a little higher,” replied Marcueil in his blank voice, with no apparent impertinence.

“Human capacities in love may well be infinite,” went on Mrs. Gough, “but as one of these gentlemen was saying a moment ago, it is a matter of definition. Now it would be interesting to know at precisely what point in the infinite series of numbers the male sex places infinity.”

“I have read that Cato the Elder placed it as high as two,” jested Saint-Jurieu, “but he meant once in the winter and mice in the summer.”

“He was sixty years old, my dear,” observed his wife, “don’t forget that.”

“That’s a lot,” murmured the general absent-mindedly, though no one could make out which of the two figures he was dreaming of.

“In the Labors of Hercules,” said the actress, “King Lysius offers the hero his thirty virgin daughters for a single night, and sings, to the music of Claude Terrasse:

‘Thirty! – that’s just a game to such as you,

I crave your pardon that I bring so few!’ ”

“But if it’s sung –” said Mrs. Gough.

“Then it’s not worth. . .” said Saint-Jurieu.

“. . .doing,” interrupted André Marcueil. “Besides, are we sure that the number was only thirty?”

“If my classical memory may be trusted,” said the doctor, “the authors of the Labors of Hercules seem to have humanized mythology. I think Diodorus of Sicily actually states: ‘Herculem una nocte quinquaginta virgines mulieres reddidisse:’”

“Which means?” asked Henriette.

“Fifty virgins,” explained the senator.

“The same Diodorus, my dear doctor, mentions a certain Proculus,” said Marcueil.

“Yes,” said Bathybius, “the man who had entrusted to him a hundred Sarmatian maidens and to ‘constuprate’ them, says the text, required only a fortnight.”

“It’s in the Treatise on the Vanity of Science, Chapter Ill,” Marcueil confirmed. “But two weeks! Why not at three months’ maturity?”

“The Thousand and One Nights,” quoted William Elson in his turn, “contends that the third Calender, a king’s son, knew, forty times apiece, forty young girls in forty nights?”

“These are Oriental imaginings,” Arthur Gough thought he should explain.

“Another Oriental article which is no article of faith, albeit enshrined in the sacred Koran,” said Saint-Jurieu, “has Mohammed boast of possessing the virility of sixty men.”

“That doesn’t mean he could make love sixty times,” observed the senator’s wife with some show of wit.

“Is he the highest bidder?” asked the general. “I think we must be playing auction manille. And this game is even more frivolous. I pass.