Romance!  Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background, where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out passions?  You look on the black bombazine and high-necked decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that underlies this despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a stone trilobite as having once been full of the juices and the nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being.  There is a wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch for the bombazine cuirass,—­a wild creature, which I venture to say would leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him.  A heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as tranquil as a tame bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has tamed it down,—­like that purple finch I had the other day, which could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic flings against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get a little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind the wires or his keeper’s handling.  I will tell you my wicked, but half involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded bombazine.

Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not touch the infirm spot?  I confess the most frightful tendency to do just this thing.  If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself imitating it.  If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that, go before him, limping.

I could never meet an Irish gentleman—­if it had been the Duke of Wellington himself—­without stumbling upon the word “Paddy,”—­which I use rarely in my common talk.

I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I was not answerable.  It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted.  A thin film of politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of thought from the stream of conversation.  After a time one begins to soak through and mingle with the other.

We were talking about names, one day.—­Was there ever anything,—­I said,—­like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious, detestable appellations,—­inventing or finding them,—­since the time of Praise-God Barebones?  I heard a country-boy once talking of another whom he called Elpit, as I understood him.  Elbridge is common enough, but this sounded oddly.  It seems the boy was christened Lord Pitt,—­and called for convenience, as above.  I have heard