“There is a pretty department of the subject which I might call grace swearing.  ‘Od’s fish,’ cried the king, when he saw the man climbing Salisbury spire; ’he shall have a patent for it—­no one else shall do it.’  One might call such little things Wardour Street curses.  ’Od’s bodkins’ is a ladylike form, and ‘Od’s possles’ a variety I met in the British Museum.  Every gentleman once upon a time aspired to have his own particular grace curse, just as he liked to have his crest, and his bookplate, and his characteristic signature.  It fluttered pleasantly into his conversation, as Mr. Whistler’s butterfly comes into his pictures—­a signature and a delight.  ‘Od’s butterfly!’ I have sometimes thought of a little book of grace-words and heraldic curses, printed with wide margins on the best of paper.  Its covers should be of soft red leather, stamped with little gold flowers.  It might be made a birthday book, or a pocket diary—­’Daily Invocations.’

“Coming back to wrathy swearing, I must confess I am sorry to see it decay.  It was such a thoroughly hygienic and moral practice.  You see, if anything annoying happens to a man, or if any powerful emotion seizes him, his brain under the irritation begins to disengage energy at a tremendous rate.  He has to use all his available force of control in keeping the energy in.  Some of it will leak away into the nerves of his face and distort his features, some may set his tear-glands at work, some may travel down his vagus nerve and inhibit his heart’s action so that he faints, or upset the blood-vessels in his head and give him a stroke.  Or if he pens it up, without its reaching any of these vents, it may rise at last to flood-level, and you will have violent assaults, the breaking of furniture, ‘murther’ even.  For all this energy a good flamboyant, ranting swear is Nature’s outlet.  All primitive men and most animals swear.  It is an emotional shunt.  Your cat swears at you because she does not want to scratch your face.  And the horse, because he cannot swear, drops dead.  So you see my reason for regretting the decay of this excellent and most wholesome practice....

“However, I must be getting on.  Just now I am travelling about London paying cabmen their legal fares.  Sometimes one picks up a new variant, though much of it is merely stereo.”

And with that, flinging a playful curse at me, he disappeared at once into the tobacco smoke from which I had engendered him.  An amusing and cheerful person on the whole, though I will admit his theme was a little undesirable.

DUNSTONE’S DEAR LADY

The story of Dunstone is so slight, so trivial in its cardinal incidents, such a business of cheap feathers and bits of ribbon on the surface, that I should hesitate to tell it, were it not for its Inwardness, what one might call the symbolism of the thing.  Frankly, I do not clearly see what that symbolism is, but I feel it hovering in some indefinable way whenever I recall his case.  It is one of those things that make a man extend his arm and twiddle his fingers, and say, blinking, “Like that, you know.”  So do not imagine for one moment that this is a shallow story, simply because it is painted, so to speak, not in heart’s blood but in table claret.