ies grow never weary of listening to my voice.

THE PEAR

'But every one is enthusiastic about the book!' I protested. 'Well, what
if they are?' was the answer.

I too am a Superior Person, but the predicament was awkward. To appear
the dupe of a vulgar admiration, to be caught crying stale fish at a
choice luncheon party!

'Oh, of course!' I hit back, 'I know it's considered the thing just now
to despise the age one lives in. No one, even in Balham, will admit that
they have read the books of the day. But my attitude has always been'
(what had it been? I had to think in a hurry), 'I have always felt that
it was more interesting, after all, to belong to one's own epoch; to
share its dated and unique vision, that flying glimpse of the great
panorama, which no subsequent generation can ever recapture. To be
Elizabethan in the age of Elizabeth; romantic at the height of the
Romantic Movement--'

But it was no good: I saw it was no good, so I took a large pear and eat
it in silence. I know a good deal about pears, and am particularly fond
of them. This one was a _Doyenne du Comice_, the most delicious kind of
all.

INSOMNIA

Sometimes, when I am cross and cannot sleep, I begin an angry contest
with the opinions I object to. Into the room they flop, those bat-like
monsters of Wrong-Belief and Darkness; and though they glare at me with
the daylight faces of bullying opponents, and their voices are the
voices that often shout me down in argument, yet, in these nocturnal
controversies, it is always my assertions that admit no answer.

I do not spare them; it is now their turn to be lashed to fury, and made
to eat their words.

READING PHILOSOPHY

'The abstractedness of the relation, on the other hand, brings to
consciousness no less strongly the foreignness of the Idea to natural
phenomena. In its widest formulation--' Mechanically I turned the page;
but what on earth was it all about? Some irrelevant fancy must have been
fluttering between my spectacles and the printed paper.

I turned and caught that pretty Daydream. To be a Wit--yes, while my
eyes were reading Hegel, I had stolen out myself to amaze society with
my epigrams. Each conversation I had crowned at its most breathless
moment with words of double meaning which had echoed all through London.
Feared and famous all my life-time for my repartees, when at last had
come the last sad day, when my ashes had been swept at last into an u