The company were amused by all this, but could not help seeing that there was a certain practical possibility about the scheme.  Our two Annexes, as we call then, appeared to be interested in the project, or fancy, or whim, or whatever the older heads might consider it.  “I guess I’ll try it,” said the American Annex.  “Quite so,” answered the English Annex.  Why the first girl “guessed” about her own intentions it is hard to say.  What “quite so” referred to it would not be easy to determine.  But these two expressions would decide the nationality of our two young ladies if we met them on the top of the great Pyramid.

I was very glad that Number Seven had interrupted me.  In fact, it is a good thing once in a while to break in upon the monotony of a steady talker at a dinner-table, tea-table, or any other place of social converse.  The best talker is liable to become the most formidable of bores.  It is a peculiarity of the bore that he is the last person to find himself out.  Many a terebrant I have known who, in that capacity, to borrow a line from Coleridge,

     “Was great, nor knew how great he was.”

A line, by the way, which, as I have remarked, has in it a germ like that famous “He builded better than he knew” of Emerson.

There was a slight lull in the conversation.  The Mistress, who keeps an eye on the course of things, and feared that one of those panic silences was impending, in which everybody wants to say something and does not know just what to say, begged me to go on with my remarks about the “manufacture” of “poetry.”

You use the right term, madam, I said.  The manufacture of that article has become an extensive and therefore an important branch of industry.  One must be an editor, which I am not, or a literary confidant of a wide circle of correspondents, which I am, to have any idea of the enormous output of verse which is characteristic of our time.  There are many curious facts connected with this phenomenon.  Educated people—­yes, and many who are not educated—­have discovered that rhymes are not the private property of a few noted writers who, having squatted on that part of the literary domain some twenty or forty or sixty years ago, have, as it were, fenced it in with their touchy, barbed-wire reputations, and have come to regard it and cause it to be regarded as their private property.  The discovery having been made that rhyme is not a paddock for this or that race-horse, but a common, where every colt, pony, and donkey can range at will; a vast irruption into that once-privileged inclosure has taken place.  The study of the great invasion is interesting.