The visitor is fortunate who leaves no marketable impression behind.  The literary entertainers eye you over, as if they were dealers in a slave mart, and speculate on your uses.  They try to think how you would do as a scoundrel, and mark your little turns of phrase and kinks of thought to that end.  The innocent visitor bites his cake and talks about theatres, while the meditative person in the arm-chair may be in imagination stabbing him, or starving him on a desert island, or even—­horrible to tell!—­flinging him headlong into the arms of the young lady to the right and “covering her face with a thousand passionate kisses.”  A manuscript in the rough of Euphemia’s, that I recently suppressed, was an absolutely scandalous example of this method of utilising one’s acquaintances.  Mrs. Harborough, who was indeed Euphemia’s most confidential friend for six weeks and more, she had made to elope with Scrimgeour—­as steady and honourable a man as we know, though unpleasant to Euphemia on account of his manner of holding his teacup.  I believe there really was something—­quite harmless, of course—­between Mrs. Harborough and Scrimgeour, and that, imparted in confidence, had been touched up with vivid colour here and there and utilised freely.  Scrimgeour is represented as always holding teacups in his peculiar way, so that anyone would recognise him at once.  Euphemia calls that character.  Then Harborough, who is really on excellent terms with his wife, and, in spite of his quiet manner, a very generous and courageous fellow, is turned aside from his headlong pursuit of the fugitives across Wimbledon Common—­they elope, by the bye, on Scrimgeour’s tandem bicycle—­by the fear of being hit by a golf ball.  I pointed out to Euphemia that these things were calculated to lose us friends, and she promises to destroy the likeness; but I have no confidence in her promise.  She will probably clap a violent auburn wig on Mrs. Harborough and make Scrimgeour squint and give Harborough a big beard.  The point that she won’t grasp is, that with that fatal facility for detail, which is one of the most indisputable proofs of woman’s intellectual inferiority, she has reproduced endless remarks and mannerisms of these excellent people with more than photographic fidelity.  But this is really a private trouble, though it illustrates very well the shameless way in which those who have the literary taint will bring to market their most intimate affairs.

ON SCHOOLING AND THE PHASES OF MR. SANDSOME

I do not know if you remember your “dates.”  Indeed, I do not know if anyone does.  My own memory is of a bridge; like that bridge of Goldsmith’s, standing firm and clear on its hither piers and then passing into a cloud.  In the beginning of days was “William the Conqueror, 1066,” and the path lay safe and open to Henry the Second; then came Titanic forms of kings, advancing and receding, elongating and dwindling, exchanging dates, losing