This time she did “pause for a reply,” and I was able to make one. It was not very satisfactory.
“No, really! You don’t care for discussing life! Well, I am surprised at that. Dangerous! What a funny idea! But if it were, that would only make it ten times more interesting to me; there is such an excitement in danger! If I had been a man I should have been passionately devoted to tiger-hunting. Now, life is a kind of tiger-hunt, when one comes to think of it; one can always get some excitement out of it—watching other people at the hunt, I mean. Don’t you think so? People take such different views of life. Good gracious! one would never get to the end of one’s friends’ views, if one began, even on one particular subject. Take love and marriage, for instance; what can be more intensely interesting than to discuss marriage with a person who holds views diametrically opposite to one’s own?”
She rattled on in this way for half an hour: it was very amusing. I felt very tame beside her, and I fancied she must have found me insufferably dull and unsympathetic. I found out afterwards that I was mistaken in this; her estimate had been very flattering. On reflection it need not have surprised me; there is nothing a great talker likes so much as a good listener.
We all parted most cordially, with mutual congratulations on the chance that had brought us together.
“I feel as bold as a lion,” said the doctor as he shook hands with my mother. “I am ready to brave an army of concierges.”
“Oh! keep the peace; keep friends with him at any cost. If you make him your enemy, he will worry your life out,” was her parting injunction.
“Well,” she said, when the door had closed on our new acquaintances, “what do you think of them?”
“I think them perfectly odious!” I replied.
“My dear Lilly!”
“Yes. They are just the kind of people we are sure to get fond of, to make a friendship with, and then away they will fly, and we shall never hear or see them for the rest of our lives.”