Yes! If you could only stay at——!
The family is small, but extremely intelligent, with minds well stored with the most varied kinds of knowledge.
Your host is a type!
Waking—with him—appears to be the momentary interruption of an animated conversation which has engaged the long hours others reserve for sleep.
With them a new day seems to open a new volume with cover, title page and preface. Not so with him.
The intervening night is simply a semi-colon in an uncompleted sentence—a Wagnerian clause in a melody that repudiates a close. This might seem to argue a too rigid adherence to a single theme with menace of monotony. Yet nothing could be less true.
At the bidding of a single word the whole scene changes with the shifting magic of a dream, and you are surprised to find yourself suddenly plunged into quite another conversational sea.
I have seen visitors at your house who would turn a deaf ear to these alert exercises of the dawn—moody men who became at once absorbed in the mere pleasures of the table; taking refuge in bacon from arguments to which they could find no auroral reply. They are cowards and I will have none of them! Rather would I emulate the tact of your hostess who finds, and welcomes, in these wide-ranging thoughts of morn, a bulwark that keeps the host from the kitchen boiler. For he is very apt to descend suddenly from his philosophic heights and pounce with unerring precision on some petty domestic error.
It is here you may observe the sweet influence of the daughter of the house, whose finesse would almost deserve the name of cunning if its purpose were not so benign.
In her skilful hands I have seen disaster averted by a dictionary and an impending storm transferred from a tea-cup to a disputed line of Tennyson.