l not answer letters; but then his writing-paper is generally
drowned deeper than plummet can sound; his pens are rusty, and his ink
is of the consistency of tar; but he will always answer questions, with
an incredible patience and sympathy, correcting one's mistakes in a
genial and tentative way, as if a matter admitted of many opinions. If
a man, for instance, maintains that the Norman Conquest took place in
1066 B.C., he will say that some historians put it more than two
thousand years later, but that of course it is difficult to arrive at
exact accuracy in these matters. Thus one never feels snubbed or
snuffed out by him.

Well, for the purposes of my argument, I will call my friend Perry,
though it is not his name; and having finished my introduction I will
go on to my main story.

I took in to dinner the other night a beautiful and accomplished lady,
with whom it is always a pleasure to talk. The conversation turned upon
Mr. Perry. She said with a graceful air of judgment that she had but
one fault to find with him, and that was that he hated women. I
hazarded a belief that he was shy, to which she replied with a
dignified assurance that he was not shy; he was lazy.

Prudence and discretion forbade me to appeal against this decision; but
I endeavoured to arrive at the principles that supported such a
verdict. I gathered that Egeria considered that every one owed a
certain duty to society; that people had no business to pick and
choose, to cultivate the society of those who happened to please and
interest them, and to eschew the society of those who bored and wearied
them; that such a course was not fair to the uninteresting people, and
so forth. But the point was that there was a duty involved, and that
some sacrifice was required of virtuous people in the matter.

Egeria herself is certainly blameless in the matter: she diffuses
sweetness and light in many tedious assemblies; she is true to her
principles; but for all that I cannot agree with her on this point.

In the first place I cannot agree that sociability is a duty at all,
and to conceive of it as such seems to me to misunderstand the whole
situation. I think that a man loses a great deal by being unsociable,
and that for his own happiness he had better make an effort to see
something of his fellows. All kinds of grumpinesses and morbidities
arise from solitude; and a shy man ought to take occasional dips into
society from a medicinal point of view, a