your tenor in the course of our conversation.” I replied that I had but one voice, and that I had not been aware that his Royal Highness had two. “That confirms my impression,” said the King, “that you are not a man, but a feminine monstrosity with a bass voice, and an utterly uneducated ear. But to continue.
“Nature having herself ordained that every man should wed two wives—”
“Why two?” asked I.
“You carry your affected simplicity too far,” he cried. “How can there be a completely harmonious union without the combination of the Four in One, viz. the bass and tenor of the man and the soprano and contralto of the two women?”
“But supposing,” said I, “that a man should prefer one wife or three?”
“It is impossible,” he said; “it is as inconceivable as that two and one should make five, or that the human eye should see a Straight Line.” I would have interrupted him; but he proceeded as follows:
“Once in the middle of each week a law of Nature compels us to move to and fro with a rhythmic motion of more than usual violence, which continues for the time you would take to count a hundred and one. In the midst of this choral dance, at the fifty-first pulsation, the inhabitants of the Universe pause in full career, and each individual sends forth his richest, fullest, sweetest strain. It is in this decisive moment that all our marriages are made. So exquisite is the adaptation of bass to treble, of tenor to contralto, that oftentimes the loved ones, though twenty thousand leagues away, recognize at once the responsive note of their destined lover; and, penetrating the paltry obstacles of distance, Love unites the three. The marriage in that instant consummated results in a threefold male and female offspring which takes its place in Lineland.”