ering when you will
go away. That you have in effect started to go away--and not gone
away--and yet must go away some time--and may go away at any minute:
this consciousness, to a person standing first on one tired foot and
then on the other, rapidly becomes almost, but never quite, unendurable.
Reason totters, but remains on the throne. One can almost lay down a
law: _Two persons who do not part with kisses should part with haste._

The way to do is to go like the sky-rocket--up and out.

But the fifteen-minute call followed by the flying exit is at best only
a niggling and unsatisfactory solution; it is next door to always
staying at home. Then certainly you would never be a bore (except to the
family); but neither by any possibility could you ever be that most
desirable factor in life, the Not-Bore. The Hermit is a slacker. Better
far to come out of your cave, mingle, bore as little as may be--and
thank Heaven that here and there you meet one whom you somehow feel
reasonably certain that you do not bore.

WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR

Of the several places in which a man waits to have something done to
him, no other is so restful as the establishment of his tailor. His
doctor and his dentist do their best with inviting chairs and a pile of
magazines on the table: one gets an impression that both of them were
once liberal subscribers to the current periodicals, but stopped a year
or two ago and have never bought a magazine since. But these, in their
official capacity, are painful gentlemen; and a long procession of
preceding patients have imparted to the atmosphere of their
waiting-rooms a heavy sense of impending misery.

The tailor is different. 'There was peace,' wrote Meredith, 'in Mr.
Goren's shop. Badgered ministers, bankrupt merchants, diplomatists with
a headache,--any of our modern grandees under difficulties,--might have
envied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided: and he was an enviable
man. He loved his craft, he believed he had not succeeded the millions
of antecedent tailors in vain.'

And so it is, I dare say, in varying degree with all tailors; or at any
rate should be, for tailor and customer meet on the pleasantest
imaginable plane of congenial interest. A person whose chief desire in
life at the moment is to be becomingly dressed comes to one whose chief
ambition in life at the moment is to becomingly dress him. No hideous
and insistent apprehension preys on the mind of the waiting custo