I think that the society of people who do want to know, and who ply one with questions as to one’s tastes and habits, are almost more trying than the purely narrative people, and induce a subtle sense of moral hypochondria.  The perfect mixture, which is not a common one, is that of the person who both desires to know and is willing to illustrate one’s experience by his own.  Then there is a still more inexplicable class—­the people who go greedily to entertainments, come early and go late, who seem to wish neither to learn nor to communicate, but sit staring and tongue-tied.  The inveterate talker is the least tiresome of the three undesirable types, because one at least learns something of another’s point of view.  But the danger of general society to a person like myself, who has a desire to play a certain part in talk, is that sometimes one is tied to an uncompromising person as to a post for execution.  I love a decent equality in the matter of talk.  I want to hear other people’s views and to contrast my own with them.  I do not wish to lie, like a merchant vessel near a pirate ship, and to be fired into at intervals until I surrender.  Neither do I want to do all the firing myself.

The odd thing is that people, like the saints in the psalm, are so joyful in glory!  They seem entirely content with their aims and methods, and not even dimly to suspect that they might be enlarged or improved.  Some of them want to talk, and some of them seem not even to wish to be talked to; a very few to listen, and a small and happy percentage desire both to give and to take.

Well, I suppose that I ought to be glad that my visitor enjoyed himself; but I cannot help feeling that my coachman would have done as well as myself—­indeed better, for he is a pleasantly taciturn man, and would not even have given way to rebellious thoughts.

The impression left on my mind by my visitor is just as though a grasshopper had leapt upon my window-sill from the garden-bed, and sate there awhile, with his blank eyes, his long, impassive, horse-like face, twiddling his whisks and sawing out a whizzing note with his dry arm.  It would please me to observe his dry manners, his unsympathetic and monotonous cries; but neither visitor nor grasshopper would seem within the reach of any human emotion, except a mild curiosity, and even amusement.  Indeed, the only difference is that if I had clapped my hands the grasshopper would have gone off like a skipjack, and after a sky-high leap would have landed struggling among the laurels; while the more I clapped my hands at my visitor, the longer he would have been delighted to stay.