I believe the man would be taken from the court-room a raving maniac.

I cannot but think that a real fool is conscious of his own foolishness.  He must realize his aloofness from the rest of mankind, and in moments of such bitter self-knowledge I can picture many whom the world regards as too far gone to comprehend their calamity praying the prayer of the court-jester, “God be merciful to me a fool.”  I am a little tender towards such.  I do not condemn them.  They have reached the stage when they are the victims of human pity—­a lamentable condition.  But those dense persons inhabiting the thickly populated region bordering on foolishness—­those self-satisfied, uncomprehending egotists occupying the half-way house between wisdom and folly, known as stupidity—­against such my wrath burns fiercely.  They are deceptive—­so un-get-at-able.  They wear the semblance of wisdom, yet it is but a cloak to snare and delude mankind into testing their intelligence.  They are not labelled by Heaven, like the fools we may avoid if we will, or to whom we may go in a spirit of philanthropy.  They do not wear straw in their hair like maniacs, nor drool like simpletons.  Now they infest society clad in the most immaculate of evening clothes.  Often they are college graduates, and get along very well with other men.  They are frequently found among the rich, sometimes even among the poor.  Sometimes they are stolid and cannot understand.  Sometimes they are indifferent and won’t understand.  Sometimes they are English.

We women are those upon whose souls their stupidity bears most heavily.  But stay—­they do not oppress all women alike!  There are women whose spiritual needs never soar above the alphabet.  When these men are men of family, and one expects to find their wives sitting with clinched hands and set teeth, simply enduring life and praying for death, one is often surprised to see that they are generally stout women, who wear many diamonds and a bovine expression in their eyes.  Evidently there is no nervous tension in their house, and the dense man is quite capable of comprehending the a b c of human nature and of keeping his family in flannels.

In strictly fashionable society the stupid man is not conspicuous, because one never has time to comprehend that one is not understood.  If he nods his head sagely and says nothing, one is probably grateful and passes on to the next, thinking that he is most entertaining.  But in that society where one sometimes sits down and breathes, where conversation is considered as a fine art, and where talk is a mutual game of battledoor and shuttlecock, then it is that your stupid man looms up on the horizon like a blanket of clouds.

In America, particularly, conversation is something which not even the French, who approach it most nearly, can thoroughly understand, for with all its blinding nimbleness and kaleidoscopic changes there is a substratum of Puritan morality which holds some things sacred—­too sacred even to argue in public—­and one who transgresses turns off the colored lights, and lo! your conversation is all in grays and browns.  To converse properly in America one must possess not only a nimble wit and a broad understanding, but he must take into consideration one’s pedigree, and the effect of the climate.