Saturday commute l: and where shall we put our car keys?

        

 If you'd let me

 have my sconces,

 Auguste, I'd never

 have considered

 this figure.

 That's fine,

 Hercule, but

 you've cost us

 a perfectly good

 place for the

 Times.

Could this be an occasion for advancing our Biography of a chair, simmering in the “Matter” to our right without reference for some time? Oh, I think not. If anything may be depended upon to excite that inchoate cleavage between two peas in a pod, lobes of a single pith, it’s a question of home furnishing; and we can’t wish this upon our Chorus at such an interval, if ever. But as to Hercule and Auguste, are they merely the country day school rug-rats they give such guile-less evidence of being, shuttled in youth from pillar to post in coaches from Mulliner in one season, Pininfarina in another;

or are they, in some advanced maturity, our Rétif de la Bretonne and Casanova, oblivious to the revolution’s chase, in Scola’s flight to Varennes? Who, indeed, would wish to say they aren’t as we’ve always known them, gentle helpmeets in their gender’s quiet journey through experience?

Oh, no. The Reckoning on the Sconces exposed sadly enough, that unnnatural demise of confidence which must lurk inherently in any attachment to fixtures, without insinuating our own seat into the fray. Auguste was wise to indulge Hercule’s excess in redress, even at some compromise of the hall table. This acquisition has more the remedial air of Miss Bullock’s pasturing of a horse in the library in Godfrey, than of any permanent disruption of domestic felicity. 

In another day or so, once the figure’s demands of maintenance have disabused its admirer of its expediency of affect, no doubt a suitable base-ment corner will be discovered, and the book review restored to its marmoreal plinth, avoir-dupois diminished as you’d suppose. 

Still, we must hope that Auguste’s leniency to the underlying gesture will not have transmogrified into any greater acceptance. We all know the zeal of the convert.

We adopt, then, confidence in that purgative aspect of expenditure’s depletions in this season, as the probable and sufficient restorative of comity we would wish for Hercule and Auguste, and take our leave of their foyer with no more than a quiet laying of our card, corner bent in homage to our passing through. They are, especially today, entitled to their nap, to which we commend all readers in their ways.