It is the sacred day set apart for the cook to tell the housemaid, in vividly illustrated verse, that she need have no fear of the policeman thinking twice of her; for the housemaid to make ungenerous reflections on ‘cookey’s’ complexion and weight, and to assure that ‘queen of the larder’ that it is not her, but her puddings, that attract the constabulary heart.  It is the day when inoffensive little tailors receive anonymous letters beginning ’You silly snip,’ when the baker is unpleasantly reminded of his immemorial sobriquet of ‘Daddy Dough,’ and coarse insult breaks the bricklayer’s manly heart.  Perhaps of all its symbols the most typical and popular are:  a nursemaid, a perambulator enclosing twins, and a gigantic dragoon.  In fact, we are faced by this curious development—­that the day once sacred to universal compliment is now mainly dedicated to low and foolish insult Oh, that whirligig!

Do true lovers still remember the day to keep it holy, one wonders?  Does Ophelia still sing beneath the window, and do the love-birds still carry on their celestial postage?  One fears that all have gone with the sedan-chair, the stage-coach, and last year’s snow.  Will the true lovers go next?  But, indeed, a florist told us that he had sold many flowers for ‘valentines’ this year, and that the prettier practice of sending flowers was, he thought, supplanting the tawdry and stereotyped offering of cards.  Which reminds one of an old verse: 

    ’The violet made haste to appear,
      To be her bosom guest,
    With first primrose that grew this year
      I purchas’d from her breast;
          To me,
          Gave she,
      Her golden lock for mine;
        My ring of jet
        For her bracelet,
    I gave my Valentine.

IRRELEVANT PEOPLE

There are numberless people who are, doubtless, of much interest and charm—­in their proper context.  That context we feel, however, is not our society.  We have no objection to their carrying on the business of human beings, so long as they allow us an uninterrupted trading of, say, a hundred miles.  Within that charmed and charming circle they should not set foot, and we are quite willing in addition, for them, to gird themselves about with the circumference of another thousand.  It is not that they are disagreeable or stupid, or in any way obviously objectionable.  Bores are more frequently clever than dull, and the only all-round definition of a bore is—­The Person We Don’t Want.  Few people are bores at all times and places, and indeed one might venture on the charitable axiom:  that when people bore us we are pretty sure to be boring them at the same time.  The bore, to attempt a further definition, is simply a fellow human being out of his element.  It is said by travellers from distant lands that fishes will not live out of water.  It is a no less familiar fact that certain dull metals need to be placed in oxygen to show off their brilliant parts.  So is it with the bore:  set him in the oxygen of his native admiration, and he will scintillate like a human St. Catherine wheel, though in your society he was not even a Chinese cracker.  Every man needs his own stage and his own audience.