stunt!' I cried.

IONS

'Self-determination,' one of them insisted. 'Arbitration!' cried
another.

'Co-operation?' suggested the mildest of the party.

'Confiscation!' answered an uncompromising female.

I, too, became slightly intoxicated by the sound of these vocables. And
were they not the cure for all our ills?

'Inoculation!' I chimed in. 'Transubstantiation, Alliteration,
Inundation, Flagellation and Afforestation!'

A FIGURE OF SPEECH

Though I sometimes lay down the law myself on public questions, I don't
very much care to hear other people do it. The heavy talker, however,
who was now holding forth about finance, showed such a grasp of his
subject, and made such mincemeat of a rash opponent, that I thought it
best, for the moment, to say nothing.

'So what you allege,' he triumphed in his overbearing manner, 'is
perfectly irrelevant. My withers are unwrung. It does not affect my
position in the least.'

And then I lightly flung my Goliath pebble. 'Withers?' I ingenuously
asked, 'what are the withers, anyhow?'

He turned on me a glance of anger and contempt. 'Withers--why the
withers--' 'It's only--only a figure of speech,' he stammered.

'Oh!' I said, with a look at the company full of suggestion, 'a figure
of speech--I see.'

A SLANDER

'But I'm told you don't believe in love--'

'Now who on earth could have told you that?' I cried indignantly. 'Of
course I believe in it--there is no one more enthusiastic about Love
than I am. I believe in it at all times and seasons, but especially in
the Spring. Why, just think of it! True-love amid the apple-blossoms,
lovers who outwake the nightingales of April, the touch of hands and
lips, and the clinging of flower-soft limbs together; and all this amid
the gay, musical, perfumed landscape of the Spring. Why, nothing, Miss
Tomkins, could be more appropriate and pretty!'

'Haven't I said so again and again, haven't I published it more than
once in the weekly papers?'

SYNTHESIS

'It's awful,' I said, 'I think it simply wicked, the way you tear your
friends to pieces!'

'But you do it yourself, you know you do! You analyse and analyse
people, and then you make them up again into creatures larger than
life--'

'That's exactly it,' I answered gravely. 'If I take people to pieces, I
do it in order to put them together again better than they were before;
I make them more real, so to speak, more significant, more esse