OF RESPECT OF PERSONS

Father Payne had been out to luncheon one day with some neighbours.  He had groaned over the prospect the day before, and had complained that such goings-on unsettled him.

“Well, Father,” said Rose at dinner, “so you have got through your ordeal!  Was it very bad?”

“Bad!” said Father Payne, “why should it be bad?  I’m crammed with impressions—­I’m a perfect mine of them.”

“But you didn’t like the prospect of going?” said Rose.

“No,” said Father Payne, “I shrank from the strain—­you phlegmatic, aristocratic people,—­men-of-the-world, blases, highly-born and highly-placed,—­have no conception of the strain these things are on a child of nature.  You are used to such things, Rose, no doubt—­you do not anticipate a luncheon-party with a mixture of curiosity and gloom.  But it is good for me to go to such affairs—­it is like a waterbreak in a stream—­it aerates and agitates the mind.  But you don’t realise the amount of observation I bring to bear on such an event—­the strange house, the unfamiliar food, the new inscrutable people—­everything has to be observed, dealt with, if possible accounted for, and if unaccountable, then inflexibly faced and recollected.  A torrent of impressions has poured in upon me—­to say nothing of the anxious consideration beforehand of topics of conversation, and modes of investigation!  To stay in a new house crushes me with fatigue—­and even a little party like this, which seems, I daresay, to some of you, a negligible, even a tedious thing, is to me rich in far-flung experience.”

“Mayn’t we have the benefit of some of it?” said Rose.

“Yes,” said Father Payne, “you may—­you must, indeed!  I am grateful to you for introducing the subject—­it is more graceful than if I had simply divested myself of my impressions unsolicited.”

“What was it all about?” said Rose.

“Why,” said Father Payne, “the answer to that is simple enough—­it was to meet an American!  I know that race!  Who but an American would have heard of our little experiment here, and not only wanted to know—­they all do that—­but positively arranged to know?  Yes, he was a hard-featured man—­a man of wealth, I imagine—­from some place, the grotesque and extravagant name of which I could not even accurately retain, in the State of Minnesota.”

“Did he want to try a similar experiment?” said Barthrop.

“He did not,” said Father Payne.  “I gathered that he had no such intention—­but he desired to investigate ours.  He was full of compliments, of information, even of rhetoric.  I have seldom heard a simple case stated more emphatically, or with such continuous emphasis.  My mind simply reeled before it.  He pursued me as a harpooner might pursue a whale.  He had the whole thing out of me in no time.  He interrogated me as a corkscrew interrogates a cork.  That consumed the whole of luncheon.  I made a poor show.