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its lawlessness; it is in its complete retirement. A bride often, even
when she felt no other embarrassment, has found that she had no voice
with which to make her responses. It simply was not there.

A lady who was presented at court, and who felt--as she described
herself wonderfully at her ease, began talking, and, without wishing to
speak loud, discovered that she was shouting like a trumpeter. The
somewhat unusual strain which she had put upon herself during the ordeal
of being presented at the English court revenged itself by an outpouring
of voice which she could not control.

Many shy people have recognized in themselves this curious and
unconscious elevation of voice. It is not so common as a loss of voice,
but it is quite as uncontrollable.

The bronchial tubes play us another trick when we are frightened; the
voice is the voice of somebody else; it has no resemblance to our own.
Ventriloquism might well study the phenomena of shyness, for the voice
becomes base that was treble, and soprano that which was contralto.

"I dislike to have Wilthorpe come to see me," said a very shy woman, "I
know my voice will squeak so." With her Wilthorpe, who for some reason
drove her into an agony of shyness, had the effect of making her talk in
a high, unnatural strain, excessively fatiguing.

The presence of one's own family, who are naturally painfully
sympathetic, has always had upon the bashful and the shy a most evil
effect.

"I can never plead a case before my father," "Nor I before my son," said
two distinguished lawyers. "If mamma is in the room, I shall never be
able to get through my part," said a young amateur actor.

But here we must pause to note another exception in the laws of shyness.

In the false perspective of the stage, shyness often disappears. The shy
man, speaking the words and assuming the character of another, often
loses his shyness. It is himself of whom he is afraid, not of Tony
Lumpkin or of Charles Surface, of Hamlet or of Claude Melnotte. Behind
their masks he can speak well; but if he at his own dinner-table essays
to speak, and mamma watches him with sympathetic eyes, and his brothers
and sisters are all listening, he fails.

"Lord Percy sees me fall."

Yet it is with our own people that we must stand or fall, live or die;
it is in our own circle that we must conquer our shyness.

Now, these reflections are not intended as an argument against sympathy
properly expressed. A r