itty and so
wonderfully unprejudiced; I cannot understand why you don't cultivate
him or her." Cultivate him or her! Cultivate garlic; those elegant white
starry flowers you wonder at my weeding out of the beds.

Compare with this the blessedness of knowing that the contents of the
other person's mind are _nice_, pure of all worldliness, pretence, and
meanness; that the creature's thoughts, if opened out to one, would
diffuse the scent of sunshine and lavender even as does clean,
well-folded linen.

Hence the charm of a whole lot of persons not conspicuous for
conversational powers: men who have lived much out-of-doors, with gun or
rod; shy country neighbours, cross old scholars, simple motherly little
housewives; and, if one get at their reality, peasants and even
servants. For we have within ourselves memories and fancies; and it
depends on our companion, on a word, a glance, a gesture, that only the
sweet and profitable ones, thoughts of kindness and dignity, should be
stirred up.

THE BLAME OF PORTRAITS

Feeling a little bit ashamed of myself, yet relieved at having done with
that particular hypocrisy, I unpinned the two facsimiles of drawings
from off my study screen and put them in a portfolio. A slight sense of
profanation ensued; not so much of infidelity towards those two dear
friends, nor certainly of irreverence towards Mr. Watts or the late Sir
Edward Burne-Jones, but referable to the insistence with which I had
clamoured for those portraits, the delight experienced at their arrival,
and the solid satisfaction anticipated from their eternal possession.

We have most of us--of the sentimental ones at least--gone through some
similar small drama, and been a little harrowed by it. But though we
feel as if there were some sort of naughtiness in us, we are quite
blameless, and on the whole rather to be pitied. We are the dupes of a
very human craving, and one which seems modest in its demands. What! a
mere square of painted canvas, a few pencil scratchings, a bare
mechanical photograph, something no rarer than a reflection in a mirror!
That is all we ask for, to still the welling-up wistfulness, the
clinging reluctance, to console for parting or the thought, almost, of
death! We do not guess that this humble desire for a likeness is one of
our most signal cravings after the impossible: an attempt to overcome
space and baffle time; to imprison and use at pleasure the most
fleeting, intangible, and un