This practically bars the stupid man from ever hearing the sound of his own voice outside the secluded walls of his own home—­or should.  It ought also to bar the simply witty man; for what is more jarring than a misplaced wit or an ill-timed jocularity?

No, the chief requisite for a seat among the glorious company of the elect is a deep-seeing, far-reaching, sensitive comprehension; a capacity to see not only through a thing but over it and under it and beyond it; to see not only its derivation and ancestry, but its purport and import and influence and posterity; to detect the inner meaning and the double meaning, and to smile alone at its surface meaning.  There are those of us, particularly women, who must have this all-enveloping comprehension if we are to be thought fit to live.  Our conversation is such that, if we were taken literally, we deserve to be strangled.

In this day of mad competition in every walk in life, it is not those who can shout the loudest, even in those busy marts where voice reigns supreme, who are going to be heard.  No one man can continue to shout the loudest.  A momentary audience and a raw throat are the most he can expect.  But it is he who can exaggerate the most intelligently and overpaint the most subtly.  That sort of impertinence will attract the eye and ear of the most loudly howling mob.  Even the wayfarer gets an inkling from a poster, but it is a man of the widest comprehension who gets the whole truth from the subtlest exaggeration, and he who possesses a sense of humor who realizes its acuteness.

To persons of this ilk the stupid man is a calamity compared to which the loss of fortune and back-door begging would be a luxury.

But of course there are grades of stupidity even among stupid men, and of these the educated stupid man is perhaps the most exhausting, because a woman is constantly led into trying to converse with him, having heard rumors that he is a college man, or that he has written a book on mathematics.  If a man is a genuine fool, of course one would merely show him pictures, or play games with him, and so save brain tissue.  But with the deceptive halfway man, one is defenceless.

A single instance of a bona-fide conversation will serve as a fearful warning to the unwary.

A graduate of a German university, a man who has written three books and has a reputation for always winning his lawsuits, sought me out after a dinner, with the fatal accuracy of a man who has dined to repletion and wishes to be amused.

Possibly because I also had dined and was therefore affable, I endeavored to see if there was any forgotten corner of his mind, any blind alley I hitherto had left unexplored, where I might find mine own and feel at home.

His face was dull, heavy, unemotional, but I said in sprightly tones to coax his lethargy: 

“I have made such a delicious discovery to-day.  I have found that Carlyle has given the most acute definition of humor I ever read.  Isn’t that rather surprising, when Carlyle’s humor is rather lumbering?”