except to themselves and now and then to
their own sex. The less there is of sex about a woman, the more she is
to be dreaded. But take a real woman at her best moment,--well dressed
enough to be pleased with herself, not so resplendent as to be a
show and a sensation, with those varied outside influences which set
vibrating the harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air about
her, and what has social life to compare with one of those vital
interchanges of thought and feeling with her that make an hour
memorable? What can equal her tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of
apprehension, her quickness to feel the changes of temperature as the
warm and cool currents of talk blow by turns? At one moment she is
microscopically intellectual, critical, scrupulous in judgment as an
analyst's balance, and the next as sympathetic as the open rose that
sweetens the wind from whatever quarter it finds its way to her bosom.
It is in the hospitable soul of a woman that a man forgets he is a
stranger, and so becomes natural and truthful, at the same time that he
is mesmerized by all those divine differences which make her a mystery
and a bewilderment to--

If you fire your popgun at me, you little chimpanzee, I will stick a pin
right through the middle of you and put you into one of this gentleman's
beetle-cases!

I caught the imp that time, but what started him was more than I could
guess. It is rather hard that this spoiled child should spoil such a
sentence as that was going to be; but the wind shifted all at once, and
the talk had to come round on another tack, or at least fall off a point
or two from its course.

--I'll tell you who I think are the best talkers in all probability,
--said I to the Master, who, as I mentioned, was developing interesting
talent as a listener,--poets who never write verses. And there are a
good many more of these than it would seem at first sight. I think you
may say every young lover is a poet, to begin with. I don't mean either
that all young lovers are good talkers,--they have an eloquence all
their own when they are with the beloved object, no doubt, emphasized
after the fashion the solemn bard of Paradise refers to with such
delicious humor in the passage we just heard,--but a little talk goes a
good way in most of these cooing matches, and it wouldn't do to report
them too literally. What I mean is, that a man with the gift of musical
and impassioned phrase (and love often deeds that to a y