be permitted to have an opinion, and the conversation, starting from the humblest conveniences of daily life, melted insensibly into more liberal subjects.  The fact is that, in ordinary life, kindness and simplicity are valued far more than brilliance; and the best brilliance is that which throws a novel and lambent light upon ordinary topics, rather than the brilliance which disports itself in unfamiliar and exalted regions.  The hero only ceases to be a hero to his valet if he is too lofty-minded to enter into the workings of his valet’s mind, and cannot duly appraise the quality of his services.

And then, too, to go back a little, there are certain defects, after all, which are appropriate at different times of life.  A certain degree of shyness and even awkwardness is not at all a disagreeable thing—­indeed it is rather a desirable quality—­in the young.  A perfectly self-possessed and voluble young man arouses in one a vague sense of hostility, unless it is accompanied by great modesty and ingenuousness.  The artless prattler, who, in his teens, has an opinion on all subjects, and considers that opinion worth expressing, is pleasant enough, and saves one some embarrassment; but such people, alas, too often degenerate into the bores of later life.  If a man’s opinion is eventually going to be worth anything, he ought, I think, to pass through a tumultuous and even prickly stage, when he believes that he has an opinion, but cannot find the aplomb to formulate it.  He ought to be feeling his way, to be in a vague condition of revolt against what is conventional.  This is likely to be true not only in his dealings with his elders, but also in his dealings with his contemporaries.  Young people are apt to regard a youthful doctrinaire, who has an opinion on everything, with sincere abhorrence.  He bores them, and to the young boredom is not a condition of passive suffering, it is an acute form of torture.  Moreover, the stock of opinions which a young man holds are apt to be parrot-cries repeated without any coherence from talks overheard and books skimmed.  But in a modest and ingenuous youth, filled to the brim with eager interest and alert curiosity, a certain deference is an adorable thing, one of the most delicate of graces; and it is a delightful task for an older person, who feels the sense of youthful charm, to melt stiffness away by kindly irony and gentle provocation, as Socrates did with his sweet-natured and modest boy-friends, so many centuries ago.

The aplomb of the young generally means complacency; but one who is young and shy, and yet has the grace to think about the convenience and pleasure of others, can be the most perfect companion in the world.  One has then a sense of the brave and unsophisticated freshness of youth, that believes all things and hopes all things, the bloom of which has not been rubbed away by the rough touch of the world.  It is only when that shyness is prolonged beyond the appropriate years, when it leaves a well-grown and hard-featured man gasping and incoherent, jerky and ungracious, that it is a painful and disconcerting deformity.  The only real shadow of early shyness is the quite disproportionate amount of unhappiness that conscious gaucherie brings with it.  Two incidents connected with a ceremony most fruitful in nervousness come back to my mind.