MAN!  Sir!  WOMAN!  Sir!  Gentility is a fine thing, not to be undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before that.

  “When Adam delved and Eve span,
  Where was then the gentleman?”

The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat is below a certain level.  Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through the social scale.  Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.

—­I had almost forgotten about our boarders.  As the Model of all the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is the reason we are not all very sorry.  Surely we all like good persons.  She is a good person.  Therefore we like her.—­Only we don’t.

This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably immortal,—­this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as I have done for the Model.  “Pious and painefull.”  Why has that excellent old phrase gone out of use?  Simply because these good painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances in the long run, that the word “painefull” came, before people thought of it, to mean paingiving instead of painstaking.

—­So, the old fellah’s off to-morrah,—­said the young man John.

Old fellow?—­said I,—­whom do you mean?

Why, the chap that came with our little beauty,—­the old boy in petticoats.

—­Now that means something,—­said I to myself.—­These rough young rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with their eyes shut.  A real woman does a great many things without knowing why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their intellects with everything they do, just like men.  They can’t help it, no doubt; but we can’t help getting sick of them, either.  Intellect is to a woman’s nature what her watch-spring skirt is to her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not to show itself too staringly on the outside.—­You don’t know, perhaps, but I will tell you;—­the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest.  Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

The young man John did not hear my soliloque, of course, but sent up one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives no visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.