lic
expense?'

'No; what did he say?'

'He said--but I must explain another time. I have to get off here.
Good-night.'

I paused, however, at the door of the bus. 'He said,' I called back, '"I
am practising Disappointment." That--you know whom I mean?--was his
answer.'

EVASION

'What do you think of the International Situation?' asked that foreign
Countess, with her foreign, fascinating smile.

Was she a Spy? I felt I must be careful.

'What do I think?' I evasively echoed; and then, carried away by the
profound and melancholy interest of this question, 'Think?' I queried,
'do I ever really think? Is there anything inside my head but
cotton-wool? How can I call myself a Thinker? What am I anyhow?' I
pursued the sad inquiry: 'A noodle, a pigwidgeon, a ninnyhammer, a
bubble on the wave, a leaf in the wind, Madame!'

DINING OUT

When I think of Etiquette and Funerals; when I consider the euphemisms
and rites and conventions and various costumes with which we invest the
acts of our animal existence; when I bear in mind how elegantly we eat
our victuals, and remember the series of ablutions and preparations and
salutations and exclamations and manipulations I went through when I
dined out last evening, I reflect what creatures we are of ceremony; how
elaborate, how pompous and polite a simian Species.

WHAT'S WRONG

From the corner of the dim, half-empty drawing-room where they sat, they
could see, in a great mirror, the other dinner-guests linger and depart.
But none of them were going on--what was the good?--to that evening
party. They talked of satiety and disenchantment, of the wintry weather,
of illness and old age and death.

'But what really frightens me most in life,' said one of them, 'what
gives me a kind of vertigo or shiver, is--it sounds absurd, but it's
simply the horror of Space, _l'epouvante siderale_,--the dismay of
Infinity, the black abysses in the Milky Way, the silence of those
eternal spaces beyond the furthest stars.'

'But Time,' said another of the group, 'surely Time is a worse
nightmare. Think of it! the Past with never a beginning, the Future
going on for ever and ever, and the little present in which we live for
a second, twinkling between these two black abysses.'

'What's wrong with me,' mused the third speaker, 'is that even the
Present eludes me. I don't know what it really is; I can never catch the
moment as it passes; I am always far ahead or far