o offer hospitality, or to accept it,
is but an instinct which man has acquired in the long course of his
self-development. Lions do not ask one another to their lairs, nor do
birds keep open nest. Certain wolves and tigers, it is true, have been
so seduced by man from their natural state that they will deign to
accept man's hospitality. But when you give a bone to your dog, does he
run out and invite another dog to share it with him?--and does your cat
insist on having a circle of other cats around her saucer of milk? Quite
the contrary. A deep sense of personal property is common to all
these creatures. Thousands of years hence they may have acquired some
willingness to share things with their friends. Or rather, dogs may;
cats, I think, not. Meanwhile, let us not be censorious. Though certain
monkeys assuredly were of finer and more malleable stuff than any wolves
or tigers, it was a very long time indeed before even we began to
be hospitable. The cavemen did not entertain. It may be that now and
again--say, towards the end of the Stone Age--one or another among the
more enlightened of them said to his wife, while she plucked an eagle
that he had snared the day before, 'That red-haired man who lives in the
next valley seems to be a decent, harmless sort of person. And sometimes
I fancy he is rather lonely. I think I will ask him to dine with us
to-night,' and, presently going out, met the red-haired man and said to
him, 'Are you doing anything to-night? If not, won't you dine with us?
It would be a great pleasure to my wife. Only ourselves. Come just as
you are.' 'That is most good of you, but,' stammered the red-haired
man, 'as ill-luck will have it, I am engaged to-night. A long-standing,
formal invitation. I wish I could get out of it, but I simply can't. I
have a morbid conscientiousness about such things.' Thus we see that the
will to offer hospitality was an earlier growth than the will to accept
it. But we must beware of thinking these two things identical with the
mere will to give and the mere will to receive. It is unlikely that
the red-haired man would have refused a slice of eagle if it had been
offered to him where he stood. And it is still more unlikely that his
friend would have handed it to him. Such is not the way of hosts. The
hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism
mixed up with it, as I shall show.

Meanwhile, why did the red-haired man babble those excuses? It was