cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that
his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a
subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation
gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of
his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for
his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe,
the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he
could not.

My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly to
employ itself with the question of how far our experiences really
affect our characters. I remembered having once classed certain
temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and others as the stuff of
comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty in the sorrows which
light natures undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them.
Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious natures; when
it befell the frivolous it was more than they ought to have been made
to bear; it was not of their quality. Then by the mental zigzagging
which all thinking is I thought of myself and whether I was of this
make or that. If it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than
frivolous, though I had no agency in choosing, I asked myself how I
should be affected by the sight of certain things, like the common
calamities reported every day in the papers which I had hitherto
escaped seeing. By another zigzag I thought that I had never known a
day so close and stifling and humid. I then reflected upon the
comparative poverty of the French language, which I was told had only
that one word for the condition we could call by half a dozen
different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky, reeking, sweltering,
and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms would give even more
English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my book of synonyms was
at the back of my table, and I would have to rise for it. Then I
questioned whether the French language was so destitute of adjectives,
after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.

With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the
person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must
have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about,
crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he
went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should
have fallen in a faint fro