I do not want to stand and chatter in some debatable land of social conventionality.  I have no store of simple geniality.  The other night we went to dine quietly with a parson near here, a worthy fellow, happy and useful.  Afterwards, in the drawing-room, I sate beside my host.  I saw Maud listening, with rapt interest, to the chronicles of all the village families, robustly and unimaginatively told by the parson’s wife; meanwhile I, tortured by intolerable ennui, pumped up questions, tried a hundred subjects with my worthy host.  He told me long and prolix stories, he discoursed on rural needs.  At last I said that we must be going; he replied with genuine disappointment that the night was still young, and that it was a pity to break up our pleasant confabulation.  I saw with a shock of wonder that he had evidently been enjoying himself hugely; that it was a pleasure to him, for some unaccountable reason, not to hear a new person talk, but to say the same things that he had said for years, to a new person.  It is not ideas that most people want; they are satisfied with mere gregariousness, the sight and sound of other figures.  They like to produce the same stock of ideas, the same conclusions.  “As I always say,” was a phrase that was for ever on my entertainer’s lips.  I suppose that probably my own range is just as limited, but I have an Athenian hankering after novelty of thought, the new mintage of the mind.  I loathe the old obliterated coinage, with the stamp all rounded and faint.  Dulness, sameness, triteness, are they essential parts of life?  I suppose it is really that my nervous energy is low, and requires stimulus:  if it were strong and full, the current would flow into the trivial things.  I derive a certain pleasure from the sight of other people’s rooms, the familiar, uncomfortable, shabby furniture, the drift of pictures, the debris of ornament—­all that stands for difference and individuality.  But one can’t get inside most people’s minds; they only admit one to the public rooms.  A crushing fatigue and depression settles down upon me in such hours, and then the old blank sense of grief and loss comes flowing back—­it is old already, because it seems to have stained all the backward pages of life; then follows the weary, restless night; and the breaking of the grey, pitiless dawn.

June 3, 1890.

I do not want, even in my thoughts, to put the contemplative life above the practical life.  Highest of all I would put a combination of the two—­a man of high and clear ideals, in a position where he was able to give them shape—­a great constructive statesman, a great educator, a great man of business, who was also keenly alive to social problems, a great philanthropist.  Next to these I would put great thinkers, moralists, poets—­all who inspire.  Then I would put the absolutely effective instruments of great designs—­ legislators, lawyers, teachers, priests, doctors, writers—­men without originality, but with a firm conception of