ng to
control it: the control being feigned by a set jaw or a hard, throaty,
uncadenced voice of preternatural solemnity. These ladies, too, wore
plagiarised gowns of the most 'original' style, plagiarised hats,
glittering plagiarised smiles; and yet they so evidently looked down on
every one else in the omnibus, whom, perhaps, after all, it had been
kinder of me to describe as the hackneyed quotations of humanity, who had
probably thought it unnecessary to wear their inverted commas, as they
were so well known.

At last I grew impatient of them, and, leaving the omnibus, finished my
journey home by the Underground. What was my surprise when I reached it to
find our little house wearing inverted commas--two on the chimney, and two
on the gate! My wife, too! and the words of endearing salutation with
which I greeted her, why, they also to my diseased fancy seemed to leave
my lips between quotation marks. There is nothing in which we fancy
ourselves so original as in our terms of endearment, nothing in which we
are so like all the world; for, alas! there is no euphuism of affection
which lovers have not prattled together in springtides long before the
Christian era. If you call your wife 'a chuck,' so did Othello; and,
whatever dainty diminutive you may hit on, Catullus, with his warbling
Latin, 'makes mouths at our speech.'

I grew so haunted with this oppressive thought, that my wife could not but
notice my trouble. But how could I tell her of the spectral inverted
commas that dodged every move of her dear head?--tell her that our own
original firstborn, just beginning to talk as never baby talked, was an
unblushing plagiarism of his great-great-great-grandfather, that our love
was nothing but the expansion of a line of Keats, and that our whole life
was one hideous mockery of originality? 'Woman,' I felt inclined to
shriek, 'be yourself, and not your great-grandmother. A man may not marry
his great-grandmother. For God's sake let us all be ourselves, and not
ghastly mimicries of our ancestors, or our neighbours. Let us shake
ourselves free from this evil dream of imitation. Merciful Heaven, it is
killing me!' But surely that was a quotation too, and, accidentally
catching sight of the back of my hand, suddenly the tears sprang to my
eyes, for it was just so the big soft veins used to be on the hands of my
father, when a little boy I prayed between his knees. He was gone, but
here was his hand--_his_ hand, not mine!