Delectable as honesty is in a bank clerk, or would be in a lawyer, one yearns for a little less accuracy in the moral makeup of the too-accurate man; for a little of the celestial leaven of exaggeration in the dusty dryness of his dead-level garrulousness.  What difference does it make whether the Revolutionary War took place before or after the discovery of America, as long as you make your war anecdote interesting?  Who cares whether Napoleon or Wellington came out ahead at Waterloo, as long as your listener is kept awake by your recital?

I related a sprightly incident only last night about a watch which Francis the Second gave to Mary Stuart, only with my usual airy touch I said Francis the Second gave it to Marie Antoinette!  What difference does it make?  They were both Marys, and they are both dead.

A most unpleasant old party corrected me, and added:  “Francis died about two hundred years before Marie Antoinette was born.”

“Then all the more of a compliment that he should have given her the watch!” I said.  And I fancy I had him there.

That is the sort of man who interrupts his wife’s dinner-stories all the way through with, “1812, my dear”; “Ouida, not Emerson”; “Herod, not Homer”; until I shouldn’t be surprised to see her throw a plate at his head.  Oh, isn’t it fine that one does not dare to do all the things one feels like doing in society?

There is only one way to get even with the too-accurate man, and that is, when he has finished his most exciting story, to say, “And then what happened next?”

Accuracy is almost fatal to a flow of spirits.  If one is obliged to weigh one’s words, one may live to be called a worthy old soul, but one will not be in demand at dinner-parties.

The too-accurate man need not pride himself upon his honesty above his fellow-men.  Oftenest he is to be found paying lithe of mint, anise, and cumin, and neglecting the weightier matters of the law—­justice, mercy, and truth.  He strains at a gnat and swallows a camel.  He is not more trustworthy than the man whose conversation is embellished with hyperbole, because he at least has the wit to discriminate, and the too-accurate man is only stupid.

In essentials, the man who decorates his conversation with mild but pleasing patterns of that style of statement made famous by one Ananias, is to be depended upon quite as surely as the man who takes all the sunshine from the day, and leads one’s thoughts to dwell on high, by spending ten minutes trying to recall whether he dropped that stone on his foot before or after dinner.  He, and not your own evil nature, should be responsible for your instinctive wish that he had happened to be toying with a bowlder instead of a small stone which could only mutilate.

The painful accuracy which makes some men such deadly bores is a form of monomania.  It is the same sort of trouble which afflicts a kleptomaniac.  She will steal the veriest trash, just so she can be stealing.  He hoards the most useless trifles until his mind is nothing but a garret filled with isolated bits of rubbish that nobody wants to hear, unless one has an essay to write; and even then it is easier to consult the encyclopaedia.