om, rubbing his hands, "He'll do; he 'll do: I always thought so."
Sophy turned: "Who'll do?--the young gentleman? Do what?"

WAIFE.-"The young gentleman?-as if I was thinking of him! Our new
companion; I have been with him this last hour. Wonderful natural
gifts."

SOPHY (ruefully).--"It is alive, then?"

WAIFE.--"Alive! yes, I should think so."

SOPHY (half-crying.)--"I am very sorry; I know I shall hate it."

WAIFF.--"Tut, darling: get me my pipe; I'm happy."

SOPHY (cutting short her fit of ill-humour).--"Are you? then I am, and I
will not hate it."

CHAPTER XII.

In which it is shown that a man does this or declines to do that for
reasons best known to himself,--a reserve which is extremely
conducive to the social interests of a community, since the
conjecture into the origin and nature of those reasons stimulates
the inquiring faculties, and furnishes the staple of modern
conversation. And as it is not to be denied that, if their
neighbours left them nothing to guess at, three-fourths of civilized
humankind, male or female, would have nothing to talk about; so we
cannot too gratefully encourage that needful curiosity termed by the
inconsiderate tittle-tattle or scandal, which saves the vast
majority of our species from being reduced to the degraded condition
of dumb animals.

The next day the sitting was renewed: but Waife did not go out, and
the conversation was a little more restrained; or rather, Waife had the
larger share in it. The Comedian, when he pleased, could certainly be
very entertaining. It was not so much in what he said as his manner of
saying it. He was a strange combination of sudden extremes, at one while
on a tone of easy but not undignified familiarity with his visitors,
as if their equal in position, their superior in years; then abruptly,
humble, deprecating, almost obsequious, almost servile; and then again,
jerked as it were into pride and stiffness, falling back, as if the
effort were impossible, into meek dejection. Still the prevalent
character of the man's mood and talk was social, quaint, cheerful.
Evidently he was by original temperament a droll and joyous humourist,
with high animal spirits; and, withal, an infantine simplicity at times,
like the clever man who never learns the world and is always taken in.

A circumstance, trifling in itself, but suggestive of speculation either
as to the character or antecedent circumstances of