n the cloth, and I was so intent in manoeuvring
my plates and spoons to cover up the speck, that I lost a good part of
her improving discourse.

I was still, however, making a tolerable pretense of attention, when a
learned person across the table was sharp enough to see that I was a
novice in the gathering. For my improvement, therefore, he fixed his
great round glasses in my direction. In my confusion they seemed
burning lenses hotly focused on me. Under such a glare, he thought, my
tender sprouts of knowledge must spring up to full blossom.

When he had my attention, he proceeded to lay out the dinner into
calories, which I now discovered to be a kind of heat or nutritive
unit. He cast his appraisal on the meat and vegetables, and turned an
ear toward the pantry door if by chance he might catch a hint of the
dessert for his estimate, but by this time, being overwrought, I gave
up all pretense, and put my coarse attention on my plate.

Sometimes I fall on better luck. It was but yesterday that I sat
waiting for a book in the Public Library, when a young woman came and
sat beside me on the common bench. Immediately she opened a monstrous
note-book, and fell to studying it. I had myself been reading, but I
had held my book at a stingy angle against the spying of my neighbors.
As the young woman was of a more open nature, she laid hers out flat.
It is my weakness to pry upon another's book. Especially if it is old
and worn--a musty history or an essay from the past--I squirm and
edge myself until I can follow the reader's thumb.

At the top of each page she had written the title of a book, with a
space below for comment, now well filled. There were a hundred of
these titles, and all of them concerned John Paul Jones. She busied
herself scratching and amending her notes. The whole was thrown into
such a snarl of interlineation, was so disfigured with revision, and
the writing so started up the margins to get breath at the top, that I
wondered how she could possibly bring a straight narrative out of the
confusion. Yet here was a book growing up beneath my very nose. If in
a year's time--or perhaps in a six-month, if the manuscript is not
hawked too long among publishers--if when again the nights are raw, a
new biography of John Paul Jones appears, and you cut its leaves while
your legs are stretched upon the hearth, I bid you to recognize as its
author my companion on the bench. Although she did not have beauty to
rous