know, while, at the same time, his output is amazing.  His table is covered deep with books and papers; but he will work at a corner, if he is fortunate enough to find one; and, if not, he will make a kind of cutting in the mass, and work in the shade, with steep banks of stratified papers on either hand.  He is always accessible, always ready to help any one.  The undergraduate, that shy bird in whose sight the net is so often spread in vain, even though it be baited with the priceless privilege of tea, tobacco, and the talk of a well-informed man, comes, in troops and companies, to see him.  He is a man too with a deep vein of humour, and, what is far more rare, a keen vein of appreciation of the humour of others.  He laughs as if he were amused, not like a man discharging a painful duty.  It is true that he will not answer letters; but then his writing-paper is generally drowned deeper than plummet can sound; his pens are rusty, and his ink is of the consistency of tar; but he will always answer questions, with an incredible patience and sympathy, correcting one’s mistakes in a genial and tentative way, as if a matter admitted of many opinions.  If a man, for instance, maintains that the Norman Conquest took place in 1066 B.C., he will say that some historians put it more than two thousand years later, but that of course it is difficult to arrive at exact accuracy in these matters.  Thus one never feels snubbed or snuffed out by him.

Well, for the purposes of my argument, I will call my friend Perry, though it is not his name; and having finished my introduction I will go on to my main story.

I took in to dinner the other night a beautiful and accomplished lady, with whom it is always a pleasure to talk.  The conversation turned upon Mr. Perry.  She said with a graceful air of judgment that she had but one fault to find with him, and that was that he hated women.  I hazarded a belief that he was shy, to which she replied with a dignified assurance that he was not shy; he was lazy.

Prudence and discretion forbade me to appeal against this decision; but I endeavoured to arrive at the principles that supported such a verdict.  I gathered that Egeria considered that every one owed a certain duty to society; that people had no business to pick and choose, to cultivate the society of those who happened to please and interest them, and to eschew the society of those who bored and wearied them; that such a course was not fair to the uninteresting people, and so forth.  But the point was that there was a duty involved, and that some sacrifice was required of virtuous people in the matter.

Egeria herself is certainly blameless in the matter:  she diffuses sweetness and light in many tedious assemblies; she is true to her principles; but for all that I cannot agree with her on this point.