Perhaps you will not at first sight agree with me in thinking that slight mental obliquity is as common as I suppose.  An analogy may have some influence on your belief in this matter.  Will you take the trouble to ask your tailor how many persons have their two shoulders of the same height?  I think he will tell you that the majority of his customers show a distinct difference of height on the two sides.  Will you ask a portrait-painter how many of those who sit to hint have both sides of their faces exactly alike?  I believe he will tell you that one side is always a little better than the other.  What will your hatter say about the two sides of the head?  Do you see equally well with both eyes, and hear equally well with both ears?  Few persons past middle age will pretend that they do.  Why should the two halves of a brain not show a natural difference, leading to confusion of thought, and very possibly to that instinct of contradiction of which I was speaking?  A great deal of time is lost in profitless conversation, and a good deal of ill temper frequently caused, by not considering these organic and practically insuperable conditions.  In dealing with them, acquiescence is the best of palliations and silence the sovereign specific.

I have been the reporter, as you have seen, of my own conversation and that of the other Teacups.  I have told some of the circumstances of their personal history, and interested, as I hope, here and there a reader in the fate of different members of our company.  Here are our pretty Delilah and our Doctor provided for.  We may take it for granted that it will not be very long that the young couple will have to wait; for, as I have told you all, the Doctor is certainly getting into business, and bids fair to have a thriving practice before he saddles his nose with an eyeglass and begins to think of a pair of spectacles.  So that part of our little domestic drama is over, and we can only wish the pair that is to be all manner of blessings consistent with a reasonable amount of health in the community on whose ailings must depend their prosperity.

All our thoughts are now concentrated on the relation existing between Number Five and the Tutor.  That there is some profound instinctive impulse which is drawing them closer together no one who watches them can for a moment doubt.  There are two principles of attraction which bring different natures together:  that in which the two natures closely resemble each other, and that in which one is complementary of the other.  In the first case, they coalesce, as do two drops of water or of mercury, and become intimately blended as soon as they touch; in the other, they rush together as an acid and an alkali unite, predestined from eternity to find all they most needed in each other.  What is the condition of things in the growing intimacy of Number Five and the Tutor?  He is many years her junior, as we know.  Both of them look that fact squarely in the face.