iness they was going to
transact over there might be, because even the stockholders in
airyoplane-manufacturing corporations would got to admit that while
airyoplane-flying ain't in its infancy, exactly, it ain't in the prime
of life, neither. Also, Abe, as long as gas only costs a dollar
twenty-five a thousand cubic feet, why should any one want to pull off
such a high-priced suicide as these here transatlantic airyoplane
voyages is going to be?"

"Anyhow, the first one has still got to be made yet, Mawruss," Abe
remarked.

"And even if the tenth one was successful, Abe," Morris concluded, "you
could take it from me, this here transatlantic airyoplane navigation
ain't going to put much of a crimp into the business of manufacturing
seasick remedies. Am I right or wrong?"

XII

THIS HERE VICTORY LIBERTY LOAN

"The way some people is acting about this here Victory Loan, Mawruss,"
Abe Potash remarked one morning in April, "you would think that they was
all presidents of a first national bank and that this here Carter J.
Glass has already made a big overdraft and if he don't like the line of
credit they are giving him, he should be so good as to take his account
somewheres else, y'understand."

"Them same people probably think that investing their money in any
securities bearing interest at less than fifteen per cent. per annum is,
so to speak, the equivalence from giving money to orphan-asylums and
hospitals, understand me," Morris Perlmutter said. "'We already give
them Liberty Loan _schnorrers_ two hundred dollars toward the expenses
of their rotten war,' they probably say, 'and _still_ they ain't
satisfied.'"

"And at that they don't mean nothing by it," Abe said, "because there is
a whole lot of business men in the United States which couldn't even
give up the family housekeeping money every week without anyhow saying
to their wives: 'Here, take my blood; take my life. What do you want
from me, _anyway_?'"

"Maybe they do and maybe they don't mean nothing by it, Abe," Morris
said, "but it would be a whole lot easier for this here Carter J. Glass
if everybody would act as his own Victory Bond salesman and try to sell
himself just one more bond than he has really got any business buying,
y'understand."

"It would be a whole lot easier for this here Carter J. Glass, Mawruss,
but it would be practically impossible for pretty nearly everybody
else," Abe remarked, "which human nature is so constituted, M