“However, there is one question which applies to all perfumes, namely, why it is that they appear to be sweetest when they come from the wrist; so that perfumers apply the scent to this part.”

To be curious about such matters would keep many a man entertained for an evening.  Some people are so much in love with their curiosity that they object even to having it satisfied too quickly with an obvious explanation.  We have an instance of this in a pleasant anecdote about Democritus, which Montaigne borrowed from Plutarch.  Montaigne, who substitutes figs for cucumbers in the story, relates: 

“Democritus, having eaten figs at his table that tasted of honey, fell presently to consider within himself whence they should derive this unusual sweetness; and to be satisfied in it, was about to rise from the table to see the place whence the figs had been gathered; which his maid observing, and having understood the cause, she smilingly told him that he need not trouble himself about that, for she had put them into a vessel in which there had been honey.  He was vexed that she had thus deprived him of the occasion of this inquisition and robbed his curiosity of matter to work upon.  ‘Go thy way,’ said he, ’thou hast done me wrong; but for all that I will seek out the cause, as if it were natural’; and would willingly have found out some true reason for a false and imaginary effect.”

The novel-reader who becomes furious with someone for letting him into the secret of the end of the story is of the same mind as Democritus.  “Go thy way,” he says in effect, “thou hast done me wrong.”  The child protests in the same way to a too-informative elder:  “You weren’t to tell me!” He would like to wander in the garden paths of curiosity.  He has no wish to be led off hurriedly into the schoolroom of knowledge.  He instinctively loves to guess.  He loves at least to guess at one moment and to be told the next.

The greater part of human curiosity has as little to be said for it—­or against it—­as a child’s whim.  It is an affair of the senses, and an extraordinarily innocent one.  It is a vanity of the eye or ear.  It is another form of the hatred of being left out.  So many human beings do not like to miss things.  We saw during Saturday’s aeroplane raid how far men and women will go rather than miss things.  Thousands of Londoners stood in the streets and at their windows and gazed at what seemed to be the approach of one of the plagues of Egypt.  No plague of locusts ever came out of the sky with a greater air of the will to destruction.  It was as though the eastern sky were hung with these monstrous insects, leisurely hovering over a people they meant to destroy.  They had the cupidity of hawks at one moment.  At another they had the innocence of a school of little fishes.  Shell-smoke opened out among them like a sponge thrown into the water.  It swelled into larger clouds monstrous in shape as the things doctors preserve in bottles.