ts zest if
there be not some devoted friend or relative sitting by and simulating
that pleasureable absorption in the performance which you yourself
only wish that you could feel.

This great companion can keep you from being lonely even in a crowd.
But there is a certain kind of crowd that he cannot abide. Beware how
you try to keep him in a crowd of unadulterated human porcupines! You
know how the philosopher Schopenhauer once likened average humanity
to a herd of porcupines on a cold day, who crowd stupidly together for
warmth, prick one another with their quills, are mutually repelled,
forget the incident, grow cold again, and repeat the whole thing _ad
infinitum_.

In other words, the human porcupine is the person considered at the
beginning of this one-sided discussion who, to escape the terrible
catastrophe of confronting his own inner vacuum, will make friends
with the most hideous bore. This creature, however, is much more rare
than the misanthropic Schopenhauer imagined. It takes a long time to
find one among such folk as lumbermen, gypsies, shirt-waist
operatives, fishermen, masons, trappers, sailors, tramps, and
teamsters. If the sour philosopher had only had the pleasure of
knowing those teamsters who sent him into paroxysms of rage by
cracking their whips in the alley, I am sure that he would never have
spoken as harshly of their minds as he did. The fact is that
porcupines are not extremely common among the very "common" people.
It may be that there is something stupefying about the airs which the
upper classes, the best people, breathe and put on, but the social
climber is apt to find the human porcupine in increasing herds as he
scales the heights. This curious fact would seem incidentally to show
that our misanthropic philosopher must have moved exclusively in the
best circles.

Now, if there is one thing above all others that the Auto-Comrade
cannot away with, it is the flaccid, indolent, stodgy brain of the
porcupine. If people have let their minds slump down into
porcupinishness, or have never taken the trouble to rescue them from
that ignominious condition--well, the Auto-Comrade is no snob; when
all's said, he is a rather democratic sort of chap. But he has to draw
the line somewhere, you know, and he really must beg to be excused
from rubbing shoulders with such intellectual rabble, for instance, as
blocks upper Fifth Avenue on Sunday noons. He prefers instead the
rabble which, on all other